Area 13
by E.V.A.Graebel
Summary: Survivors made it to safety in an underground complex, but it is really safe? Or will they have to flee to Pittsburgh? Living Dead movies crossover. Ch 27 is online!
1. Chapter 1

**AREA 13**

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Okay, caveats follow.

AE – alternate ending (some live and some die)   
AU – alternate universe (they're not sequels, GAR said so)  
OC – original characters  
FEG – flesh eating ghouls….. oh, my bad, flesh eating zombies (FEZ) :)  
G,V, & ZT – gore, violence and zombie torture

I own nothing.

This is a crossover between DOTD2004, a modernized Day, and possibly some Land. I'm just having fun so I hope you do too.

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**Reaching the Water**

The Crossroads Mall shuttle careens into the marina. The front end takes out several boats, although no one is here to see it. It smashes into the dock, boards ripping up as the heavy weight plows into them, and settles almost ten feet from the shore perched unsteadily on the wooden braces.

The back door flies open and the survivors spill out. Michael and Ana jump free followed by Nicole and Terry with Chips at their heels. A bloodied Kenneth grabs the bags of ammo that CJ dumps out. The security guard reaches back inside for the third as the zombies race across the corner into line of sight.

"Come on!" Kenneth shouts and runs for the front of the shuttle.

"Fuck!" CJ drops the third bag and drags the propane tank to the back of the truck. They're coming faster than he'd imagined. He shoots, loads another shell, and shoots again. But he's too slow dragging the tank. One zombie slows as it steps onto the shaking pier, almost slavering in anticipation. CJ puts a shotgun blast into it from twenty feet. Its face fills with lead shot but it doesn't go down. The eyes have popped from the blast but it's like it can still smell him, and it keeps coming.

"Run for it!"

"Come on, CJ! Run!"

He chances a glance back and sees Kenneth sighting down on the propane tank. The shotgunned zombie is still coming. But CJ doesn't bother. He dives off the dock into the water as Kenneth pulls the trigger.

The **_whomp_** hits him underwater and the concussive force presses him all the way into the soft silt as the first tank goes and sets off all three they were carrying. He sucks in water by accident and starts coughing so hard that he almost forgets to push off the bottom. At the last second he kicks against the bottom and heads towards daylight.

He breaks the surface of the water and sucks in air amidst the smell of burnt propane and wood. Kenneth and Michael are waving for him to hurry and he swims slowly toward them. They're shouting something at him but he can't hear them.

"What?" He asks as he gets close enough for them to grab him and pull him out of the water.

"You lost your hat." Michael says with a smile.

"Yeah," he says bitterly. "It fucking figures."

"You're alive." Kenneth deadpans.

The three men turn to watch the zombies clustered on the shore. They are milling around as though they can't determine how to cross the empty void to where the survivors are. None of the three are complaining, the last thing they need are zombies that can swim.

"Alive." CJ says introspectively. "I guess there's that."


	2. Chapter 2

**Adrift**

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"Shit! It's on fire!" Terry jumps back as billowing smoke pours out of the engine compartment.

"Throw some water on it." CJ shoulders him out of the way and dumps a bucket over the flames. The engines sparks and dies under the onslaught. Then, it pops and groans as the hot metal cools rapidly and sends steam skyward. A piston groans and bows outward, cracks shattering the point where it attaches to the engine head.

He stares at the useless engine with ire. "It's just like Steve. Buy a fucking boat with a piece-of-shit engine. Look at that. Less than 35 HP. It needs at least…" He glances up to see the others staring at him. "What? Can't a guy have a hobby?"

Ana gives him a funny smile. "I didn't even know you could read."

"Absolutely uncalled for." He mutters as he hands Terry the bucket. "This is shot. We're going to have to sail this. There's nothing we can do with the engine block except rip it out and install a new one. And a place to dry dock is the least of our worries."

"You know how to sail?" Ana asks.

"Not a clue. Anybody else?"

The six survivors stare at each other. No one volunteers. The morning is still clear and open and for a long moment, they can almost forget what they crossed to get here. But the blood drying on Kenneth's shirt still reeks of Monica's perfume, Michael's shirt is ripped where a zombie got a hold of him downtown but didn't manage to bite through, and CJ is missing his hat. They haven't forgotten yet.

"We could just drift for a while." Nicole offers.

"Cause that's a plan." CJ mocks softly. "Or how about we figure out how to drive ourselves."

"I was just…!" She cries at him.

"Enough." Ana steps between them. "We have to solve our problem. So, boats are like cars, right? There should be an owner's manual around here somewhere. At the very least, Steve might have some oars on board."

Kenneth has quit listening and walks to the bow as he looks into the distance. His eyebrows furrow as though he can't quite decide what he's seeing. After a second Michael joins him and the two men both stare at the horizon.

"Do you see it?" Kenneth asks him.

"I think so."

"What is it?" Ana has picked up their conversation and she and the remaining members of the party join them in staring towards the edge of the water.

"Land."


	3. Chapter 3

**You ****Should've Listened  
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The boat coasts into the dock under less than apt hands, but they've learned a lot through trial and error over the last two hours. While they couldn't pass for able seamen, the boat has made it to the island. Kenneth tosses out the bumpers as they coast in and grabs onto the heavy pilings. His biceps flex as he tries to slow their momentum with brute strength. Michael, CJ and Terry join him and between their combined efforts, the boat slows and rocks to a halt.

"Do you see anyone?" Nicole asks.

"Stay behind me." Kenneth readies his shotgun and the survivors follow him off the boat. He stops CJ just as he is getting ready to step over. "Wait, we need someone to stay with the boat."

"Why?"

Kenneth gives him a dark look. "In case we're wrong about what's here."

"I'll buy that." CJ removes his foot from the side. "But if little Miss Muffet runs after that dog again…"

The threat doesn't need to be spoken. Kenneth agrees with it.

"Stay sharp."

The group isn't five feet up the dock when Chips makes a dash for the tree-line just above the small dock. The trees begin rustling as Nicole calls frantically for the dog, already vanished in the undergrowth.

Kenneth grabs her shoulder, looking away from the woods. "No. They're not interested in him. He'll come back."

Fear and irrational panic sweep across her face. "But Chips can't make it without me."

CJ sees the exchange on the boat and pulls his shotgun to the front of him. "Dumb bitch is going to go after the dog."

Chips is still barking ferociously in the woods and the group has almost reached the end of the dock. Nicole is pressing ahead past Kenneth. She's almost two feet in front of him calling for Chips.

The zombie launches itself from the hilly trees. The face is dark with rot and delayed decomposition. One eye hangs from the shriveled remnants of the optic nerve and it grabs Nicole by the hair before Kenneth can react. The zombie and Nicole both hit the ground just off the dock and it sinks its teeth into the skinny piece of flesh above her eye and rips the eyebrow off like skinning meat from a barbequed rib.

Nicole screams and blood pours from the wound. She slaps at the zombie ineffectively.

Terry charges forward, knocking Kenneth's aim so that the cop can't shoot.

"No! Get back!" Ana shouts. Then, she turns and runs back towards the boat. "Michael! Kenneth!"

Michael is already running and Kenneth reluctantly joins him. Behind them, Terry grabs the zombie and throws it off Nicole as two more zombies grab him around the waist and bear him down. He starts screaming as one bites through the Achilles tendon so that it snaps, momentarily disorienting the zombie struck. Then, they turn back to their meal with relative fervish. They've been almost a month without fresh meat on the island. In the background, Chips continues to bark until he too falls silent.

"Oh god." Ana whispers as she turns away from the scene behind them. "Isn't anywhere safe?"

Michael wraps his arms around her as she closes her eyes. He shares a glance with the other two men. An unspoken agreement is reached and they roughly turn the boat back out into the open water of the lake.


	4. Chapter 4

**Watch the Sky**

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Ana sits by herself at the back of the boat. She's a little bit numb from everything and the thought keeps going over and over in her mind that they're still just waiting to die. The food on the boat ran out this morning and they're down to the very last dregs of water. They can drink lake water if it comes to that, but if every island is infested it all comes back to the beginning.

_They're just waiting to die._

Michael sees her and sits down cross-legged next to her. His eyes, perpetually sad, gaze at her until she turns to acknowledge him. "It's a beautiful day."

"I wasn't looking at it." She says softly. "I was thinking about us. About _them_."

"We'll find an island. Kenneth, CJ and I were talking it over. At least an island will have a fixed population. We have a good chance of clearing it if we take our time and do it the right way."

"With no food, we're running out of time."

He grins and it makes him look almost boyish. "One problem at a time, Ana. We're doing the best we can."

She starts to respond when they hear a gasped yell. "_FUCK! Fuck me_!" CJ screams from the bridge as he lunges out the deck. "LOOK!"

Their eyes turn skyward and the boom hits them as the plane travels over head. The boat rocks in the water and everyone's eyes tear from the plane. They're so in awe that they miss hearing every window shatter and collapse from the concussive force.

"Wait!" CJ screams as though the plane could hear him. "Come back!"

Kenneth stares at it impassively. His shotgun cradled in his hands. "They're going too fast. They never saw us."

Michael clutches Ana to him. But his eyes never leave the glowing white contrail streaking across the blue sky. "It's turning."

"It's not turning." CJ snarls angrily. "That's the curvature of the horizon."

"It's turning." Kenneth echoes. "Look."

They watch in awe as the jet slowly curves around and heads back towards them. It arcs over the lake for one pass and then another as they jump up and down on the boat like idiots. Tears streaking down more than one set of cheeks. On the last pass the pilot waves down at them, so low they can see his arm and helmet, and then waggles the wing tips before his afterburners spark and he roars off.

"What did that mean?" Ana asks.

"He saw us." Kenneth smiles broadly. "I knew the military couldn't be overrun everywhere. He saw us."

"So someone will come."

That thought buoys them up as Steve's boat continues to float serenely across Lake Michigan.

Someone will come.

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**Hi, don't know if anyone is reading. I know these chaps are a bit slow. Action will pick up next two. Lotsa zombies as I start to bring everybody together. **

**Feedback is always great. Even if you just wanna tell me I suck. I mean, I hope not, but if you feel the need just remember...my zombies know where you live.**


	5. Chapter 5

**Underground**

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_One day earlier._

Jayne Canton jogged underneath the heavy filtration pipes and heard her footsteps as they echoed out into the darkness and back again. The dank underground smell and the dampness made the run less than enjoyable but her options were limited. To really stretch her legs she had the option of here, a treadmill in the common area, or a dash across an open stretch of land with zombies on her heels.

So she rounded another corner, twisted her abdomen to miss the fire extinguisher hanging there and ran on. The corridors under the complex ran for over twenty miles, most of them were boring hallways where doors hid national secrets in huge fire-proof, mildew-proof, bomb-proof vaults. State of the art computer systems hid in there too. Most of them were still spewing the chaotic messages that had accompanied the collapse of the world a month earlier. No one bothered to read them anymore. They were all just trying to get by.

Jayne stayed away from those corridors. The long sterile hallways gave her the creeps. It was easier to run down here in the maintenance tunnels. Where she could forget what the world was like and just concentrate on keeping her balance and watching out for the guts of complex that some idiot engineer had built only five feet off the floor.

Her radio hung off the back of her belt, secured over sweats, but it still bounced against her hips with every step.

"Canton? Canton, come back."

She cursed as she slowed and unclipped it. The belt immediately slid up without its weight. "Hey, Canton, here. Over."

The Irish voice on the other end wasn't obviously drunk, but it was 10:30 in the morning and McDermott usually started earlier than that. Jayne smiled sardonically, she didn't blame him. As their comm. man, he got all the bad news the world had to give, she would have been drunk too. "Bird went up. There's survivors somewhere east of us."

"DeWayne isn't in the air." She said back. She'd checked the flight log before she left to jog.

"He just left. I've got satellite photos though. Good ones. Six confirmed bodies, no visible bites."

"Fuck." Jayne said that to herself and didn't bother to send it over the radio. Then she clicked on the send button. "How old are the images?"

McDermott got all of the satellite images under United States control, everything except for black ops satellites which they still couldn't access. What they'd learned upon arrival to Area 13 was that any anomalous behavior in the US was catalogued and sent here for intelligence analysis. It also gave them the chance to look for survivors – not that there were many.

She got some static and jumped sideways as a drop of water went down her neck. "McDermott?"

"Less than a day old. DeWayne said half a day for visual confirmation if they haven't gone underground…and we don't think they have. Chopper's going up as soon as he radios back with information. Sarah wants you and Rhodes in the air."

"Roger, that." She sighed once the radio was clipped back onto her belt. So much for the morning run.

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**Sorry, next chapter will be action packed. Had to introduce who was coming first. You remember Rhodes, don't you?**  



	6. Chapter 6

**Zombie Run**

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Jayne leaned out the side of the chopper, Jack Rhodes was at her side. He was three inches taller than her with a cruel twist to his features that sometimes matched the man underneath them. But, like so many, he'd been thrust into a situation that defied reason. Jayne hadn't seen what his unit had to battle to get through to them. She'd been lucky, like Sarah and the others, they'd been airlifted into Area 13 less than 24 hours after the outbreak.

What she'd seen of the dead had come afterward as they 'collected' specimens for Dr. Logan and the others. Jayne wasn't too keen on that duty but she hadn't been given much choice. There weren't enough soldiers left to patrol Area 13 and ensure that everything ran smoothly for the scientists. The stress alone wore them down.

She liked Rhodes most of the time and wondered if he wasn't just a little misunderstood by the men underneath him. They called him Kaiser when he wasn't listening, and sometimes when he was.

"See them?" He asked her and pointed out of the chopper to a group of people waving at them from the boat.

"Yes, Captain."

He gave her a funny look. "Well then, Sergeant. Let's land there and secure the area."

John listened to the instructions and landed the chopper one hundred yards from the shore just as the boat scraped sand. Its keel grated on the rocks and settled to a halt. Jayne wasn't paying any attention. She, Cpl. Hawkes, and Pvt. Jimenez leaped onto the sand and scanned the area.

Two walking dead glanced toward them and then broke into awkward shambling runs. The first was an older man who moved faster than he had in life. His skull hung by tenuous flaps and flopped as he came. Jayne brought up her M-16, sighted and gave him two body shots to slow him down. As he came back up she put his head between her crosshairs and pulled the trigger.

The shot blew the top of his head off. Rotten brain and skull crumpled under the impact and splashed over his shoulders as the zombie collapsed mid-stride.

Jimenez peppered the second with bullets. A line straight from mid-thigh to skull.

"Don't waste bullets!" Rhodes shouted at him.

Jimenez cursed shallowly as he spotted a new group headed toward them. "Zeds, three o'clock!"

"How many?" Jayne moved around the front of the chopper to scan the opposite side.

"Twenty plus." Jimenez answered. "Get those fuckers on the bird."

"No time."

Jayne and Hawkes both reached Jimenez's side at the same time. Hawkes dropped to one knee and began shooting as fast as he could find a target. His first shot tore the jawbone off a zombie which didn't even slow it. Hawkes tracked back and used another shot to down it. Jayne shot slower, choosing her targets more carefully as Jimenez struggled to reload.

The dead were closer. Jayne tapped Hawkes and he ran for the chopper as the spent ammo casing dropped by her feet. She turned and signaled for Jimenez to follow.

"But, Canton!" He protested.

"Go!"

Her earpiece crackled as Jayne dropped the magazine from her rifle and slid the closest one home. Five zombies left. A full clip. Two head shots that splattered brains on the sand. The next zombie was speeding up as it headed toward fresh meat. She put three shots into center of mass but it didn't slow. One bullet clipped the shoulder blade and broke the bone so hard that a piece splintered and shot through the meat of its shoulder.

Two left.

"Canton, we're leaving!" Sang out Rhodes voice.

"Almost done." She replied tersely.

The harsh boom of a shotgun surprised her so much that she spun on the man holding the weapon. Kenneth hit the zombie at less than ten feet and pulverized the neck of it. The zombie's head bobbled for a moment and then dropped off. It was still alive-ish as it moaned toward them but no longer had any locomotion.

"Get on the chopper!" She shouted at him, her voice almost lost under the harsh chopper blades.

"There's….!" He started to shout.

Jayne brought her rifle up. A classic move that she'd been taught in boot camp and never thought she'd actually use. A sharp jab of the butt into the zombie's face at eye level.

The brow bone crunched and stove inward. Blood gushed out over her weapon as she withdrew it for an additional strike. The zombie was still trying to move forward. One skeletal hand pawed at her shoulder as Jayne hammered the butt down for the second stroke. The skull disintegrated with a squelching sound. The zombie remained on its feet for another two seconds, held up by her weapon. But Jayne put one combat boot against the crushed remains of the head and pushed it off. She took her time as she wiped off most of the gore on the ghoul's clothing and gestured for Kenneth to head to the chopper.

Rhodes grabbed her hand as she swung onboard. "What was that about?"

"Stress relief."

"Who the fuck are you people?" Asked a dark-haired man, one of the survivors. Rhodes hadn't taken their weapons yet but Jayne knew it was a matter of time.

None of their people answered. They were soldiers. Even at the end of the world that much was obvious.

"Where are we going?" Asked the woman and Jayne took a little bit of pity on her, after all they'd survived this long.

"Area 13. Safety."

She heard Jimenez snort under his breath and she gave him a dirty look while Rhodes thumped him on the head. And as they flew back towards what Sgt. Jayne Canton called safety, she hoped that she wasn't really lying to them about what waited for them. She hoped she wasn't lying to herself as well.

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**Teaser: What are they studying at Area 13? And why do the men think that there are zombies there who are older than the outbreak?**

**Please review if you stopped by. **


	7. Chapter 7

**Self Service**

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Two hours passed as they flew steadily westward across the chaotic landscape that was all that was left of western civilization. The interior remained quiet, mostly because only Jayne and Rhodes were miked in to the chopper system. The others had to make do with standard mickey mouse headsets.

Jayne watched as John sang to himself as he flew. The tall Caribbean man continually checked his gear and the sky around them. He was one of the best pilots she'd ever flown with, in the military or out of it. But his song faltered and stopped as the helicopter coasted down 100 feet of altitude and leveled out again.

"What are you doing?" Rhodes demanded anxiously.

"Hey, mon." John didn't like Rhodes but you couldn't tell it from his voice. "If you want me to ration fuel at the complex, then we have to refuel the bird out here."

"Where?" Rhodes snapped.

"The airport, Captain. We'll head to the airport."

Rhodes shared a worried glance with Jayne. He didn't like being outside of the complex and he hated the survivor runs. If Canton's Lieutenant hadn't bought the farm on a rescue op he wouldn't have to be. But the bastard had been like every Marine Rhodes had ever known, all full of chivalry and high ideals. Rhodes knew better. Life would come up and bite you in the ass unless you watched out for yourself. And since _he_ was the most important person in his life…well, he wasn't about to risk it.

"Well!" He shouted at Canton as she and the two other Marines leaned in to listen.

"Yes, sir. You don't have to yell."

"Guess who gets to pump the gas?"

The frown was so slight that Rhodes wasn't even sure that he'd seen it. He watched as she clicked on the mike to John. "Why don't you find us a full service station?" Her voice was full of laughter and the pilot echoed it.

"Self service only, Jaynie-girl."

Jayne Canton looked out the window as the helicopter cleared the edge of the field. The main airport was thick with zombies in between the wrecked hulks of the planes. The evacuation had drawn thousands here. They arced higher and towards a smaller side runway that housed private planes and the weather choppers that were still grounded. Most of those had been forgotten in the chaos.

"Circle twice." She asked John and he complied so that she could assess the ground situation.

Jimenez and Hawkes scooted close to her so that she could shout to them. "Bait and switch?" Hawkes asked.

"And plenty of bait." She turned to look at the four survivors in the chopper. "Plenty."

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They touched down on the roof of the St. Paul Small Flyers Association headquarters. Boots rang hollowly on the sheet metal roof as Jayne helped Ana out of the chopper and let the others jump out by themselves. John pulled the chopper away and flew back up into the sky.

"What the hell is this shit?" CJ demanded. "Who the fuck are you people?"

"She's a Marine." Kenneth supplied. "Out of uniform though."

Jayne nodded correctly at his assessment. She wore the pixilated camoflauge pants in urban colors but had swapped out the matching blouse for a plain green t-shirt underneath her ammo vest. Her long brown hair was tied back in a ponytail with another thin band holding it back at her hairline. "Sergeant Jayne Canton. Formerly at Quantico. They shipped my unit to the complex when everything went to hell. Most of us are dead now. Jimenez, Hawkes and I regularly run rescue detail. Which is how you made our acquaintance."

"So you're taking us someplace safe?" Michael asked softly. "Cause it looks like you're going to leave us here."

Jayne smiled. "See that pump over there?" She pointed to one almost half a mile away. The others turned to see it. "They need enough time to refuel the bird. You can't do that with a hundred zeds bearing down on you."

"Zeds?" CJ asked.

"Zeds. Zombies. Rots. Stenches. Pick your epithet of choice. We're going to get their attention and keep it long enough for them to refuel the bird." She pointed again so that they could see the chopper hovering long enough to drop off Hawkes on another roof with a sniper rifle. "Two men to cover from the ground. Rhodes to cover from the bird…"

"And who pumps the gas?" Kenneth asked.

She grinned again. "I really need to learn to use my rank. But if anybody else wants to volunteer…"

They look at her silently. She wasn't really expecting anything else. "Here's the fun part and I hope you could all help me out. I have to make that run." She extends one arm towards the fuel pump. "And stand there long enough to fill the bird. So the better you keep their attention the longer I have a chance of surviving."

"Why?"

The question from CJ throws her off. She has to think about it, and while she does he continues.

"I mean life spans aren't exactly long anymore. Not since those things started happening."

She locked eyes with him and Jayne felt a little bad. They really thought that there was a perfect safe place, one that wasn't marred by any of the reality around them. It hit her almost painfully that she missed her former life with a fierce nostalgia. She might have liked Rhodes in that life and she might have lived free of nightmares. Not like this one.

"What makes you think that they're new?"

Horrified silence meets her proclamation.

"What do you mean?" Ana whispers.

Her radio crackles and Jayne lifts it in front of her to forestall answering questions she doesn't want to deal with. Those kind of answers are in Sarah and Dr. Logan's provenance – and even they don't have any real answers.

"We're ready, Jaynie."

"Roger that." She hands the radio to CJ and slings her rifle over one shoulder as she got ready to vault from the one story roof. "I'd appreciate it if you could make a lot of noise." And she dropped to the cracked concrete, feeling the concussion punch through her knees. It was only half a mile.

A half mile gauntlet if those at her back failed.


	8. Chapter 8

**The Gauntlet**

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CJ just watched as the woman ran across the tarmac. "Déjà vu." He said to himself.

"What?" Michael called back.

"Just like fucking nursery school." CJ spat onto the roof as he crouched over the edge. "The goddamned buddy system." And he dropped off the edge.

"CJ!" Ana gasped as he was gone.

"We can't help him now." Michael grabbed her by the waist before she could run to that side. "Only if we make more noise."

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Halfway to the fuel station Jayne heard the change in the tempo of the shouts and glanced back to see CJ following her. She cursed and shot a zombie shuffling toward her from the far field. One bullet clipped the side of its face and tore a section of skin loose. The zombie, still wearing his pilot uniform, kept coming so she shot it again. The second shot hit so cleanly she thought she'd missed. The zombie kept running, even as whatever drove him shorted out and made him tumble over his own knees.

She didn't stop. Most of the walkers were distracted by the noise, but enough were headed toward her.

John was hovering right above her and as soon as she was close enough, the chopper lightly touched down on the concrete. Jayne shoved the fueling pump into the locking mechanism and snarled as fuel spilled out early and splashed across her boots. Rhodes saw the survivor headed toward them and grimaced out the chopper window at her.

But Rhodes didn't see the shambling man headed toward Jayne. The remnants of a business suit dragged around his ankles. The zombies that had brought him down had chewed off the meat of his thighs and calves and he walked with a strange incoherence, as though the muscles and tendons were only linked through piecemeal connections.

She turned to the pump to engage the cycle as the man lunged onto her. Her hand was close enough that the fuel gauge flipped on and they crashed to the ground.

Teeth snapped in the air only inches from her face.

"Rhodes!" She screamed.

Inside the chopper, Rhodes was shooting out the opposite window. He never heard her screams over the _whup-whup-whup_ of the blades.

Jayne struggled with the weight on top of her. The putrefying meat smell was overwhelming and she fought the urge to vomit as the man weight's held her down. He outweighed her, even without the several pounds of missing flesh, and she couldn't get him off. She grabbed for a better hold and felt her finger sink into rotting meat.

Just as she thought she was losing her grip, a hand grabbed the zombie from behind, and dragged it off of her. CJ threw it away from her, and as it lunged up with a feral hiss, he placed his shotgun against its forehead and pulled the trigger. Pink mist exploded outward from the shell and sprayed across the front of CJ's clothes.

"Ah, that's fucking nasty." He turned back to Jayne. "You okay?"

"Watch out!" Another zombie darted around the back of the chopper. Jayne took one step and kicked it in the chest. She hit it so hard that it staggered back as she planted her foot down and drew steel it.

The woman hissed, screeched, and scrabbled for purchase on the concrete as her hair was drawn up into the back rotor of the helicopter. It took a split second for her head to be snatched into the whirling blades and pulverized. The rotor slowed and sputtered as hair and bone spun free of the core.

"What are you doing to my bird?" John shouted in her ear.

"How are we doing?" Jayne shouted back angrily as she shot an approaching man, CJ getting the next one.

"They're keeping most of them at the building." John said as he could see the huge crowd trying to get at the three survivors still on the roof. "Oh fuck me."

"That's a bad sound." She left CJ with the pump and crept to the front of the chopper.

Across the field, the crowds of dead from the airport had gathered. Their combined weight bowed the long chain link fence and as Jayne watched, the posts ripped up from the earth and the fence went down. The runners were already headed toward them. The fact that they were coming wasn't what paled her face, it was how many there were.

"John?" She asked into her radio as she moved back around the bird. "How full are you?"

"Almost there."

Jayne reached out to touch CJ's sleeve and he almost shot her. "Whoa!"

"Jesus Christ." He said apologetically. "Say something first."

"You need to get on board the chopper."

"Why?" CJ challenged her. The fool woman would already be dead if he hadn't taken matters into his own hands.

"Because they're coming."

He chilled at her words. "How many?"

"Thousands."

"So let's pull the pump and go!" He would have yanked it out except that she stopped him.

"We're not full yet."

He jumped as she raised her gun and shot past him. The noise deafened him slightly in the left ear. Behind him a zombie crashed to the ground, a bullet perforating the center of the neck in a neat hole.

"Don't be a fucking hero." He told her. "Let's go get the others."

But there was no alternates in her mind. The chopper had to be full before they took off, it was too much of a risk to come out this way again. "Please, get on the chopper. I'll be right behind you."

He grumbled but he grabbed the door and swung inside. Rhodes wasn't even bothering to shoot at the oncoming masses, thousands hadn't really done the crowd justice. There were at least twenty thousand dead at the airport who'd been praying for salvation when they were left behind. Twenty thousand who'd fallen, slowly or quickly, to their families and to complete strangers. Their entrails dragged across the scorching tarmac as the sun beat down. And now they were coming.

"We're full." CJ heard John shout to Rhodes.

The Captain thumped on the glass to get Jayne's attention and he gave her a thumbs up. But the Sergeant didn't get on board. The three men watched as she pulled the gas line out in front of the helicopter and left it running.

Fuel poured across the ground in a deepening puddle. The front wave of the horde was less than a half a mile away. Jayne pulled it as far as it would go and walked a long line back and forth across the ground. Fuel splashed and gurgled as it came out. The zombies kept coming.

She dropped the end of it on the ground and came back around the helicopter as another zombie tackled her to the ground.

They hit hard and the concussive blow knocked it off of her for a moment. Jayne pistol whipped the man in the head but it wasn't hard enough to kill him. She drew back her arm for another blow when another zombie grabbed it from behind. There was a yellowed flash of teeth and Jayne thought that it was all over.

She never heard the crack of the sniper rifle. The teeth shattered inward as the .50 cal round pulverized the zombie and narrowly missed taking out John in the cockpit as it continued another six hundred feet. The second zombie was crawling onto her as she thrust one boot into the foaming mouth and kicked it off.

She kicked it again as she got to her feet and whipped the lighter out of her pocket. The helicopter started to lift off the ground as Jayne flicked the flame on and stepped onto the landing struts, one hand hanging onto the open door. The man came at her again, trying to pull her back out. Jayne kicked him again, this time breaking his nose.

"Now!" John called back to her and she tossed the lighter out of the chopper.

It fell, end over end, through the air.

And seconds above impact, the flames ignited the fumes rising off the fuel leak. John shot them straight up in the air as the first explosion lit up the ground. Flames rushed toward the underground reservoir, zombies reached into the air toward the fleeing chopper, and then everything went white.

Rhodes and CJ pulled her into the safety of the interior as she looked down at the inferno. Even the zombies on the edge of the blast were burning, and in their confusion, they were lighting the others around them on fire.

"Are you bitten?" Rhodes demanded, his hands and eyes checked her for wounds but she'd been lucky. Luckier than most.

"Now that's a fucking gauntlet." CJ said to her as they looked down at the carnage. "You try to run that shit and you can do it alone."

Jayne laughed, and then really laughed as she hadn't in a long time, as the chopper turned as they went back for the other survivors. "You know what? You couldn't pay me enough."


	9. Chapter 9

**Pop. 574**

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The chopper landed inside of the electric fence. There wasn't much on the surface except for a few crates, a large black box, and the scattered beer bottles that some of Rhodes' soldiers liked to chuck at the zombies. And there were zombies.

They shuffled around the outskirts of the fence and every once in a while one would get too close and spark with fire. The burned skeletons near the fence testified to the voltage running through it. Four soldiers weren't paying any attention to the dead around them as they played cards on a broken table with crates acting as chairs.

All four looked up and waved as John brought the chopper onto the ground, but none got up from their game.

"What the fuck is this shit?" Rhodes snarled as he got out of the bird. "You lily-livered shits get to miss the meat run and so you abandon your duties? Look sharp, assholes. We've got survivors."

"Yeah." One of them slurred around his cigarette as his eyes followed Ana's departure from the chopper. "That's some kind of survivor."

The three Marines' eyes narrowed as they heard the comment. Jimenez and Hawkes looked immediately to Jayne who shook her head minutely. Rhodes caught the exchange and bristled.

"Whose fucking army are you in? Act sharp! Get the fuck up!" He dragged one of the men to his feet. "Or I'll have you so deep in Logan's lab that the latrine will look like fucking fairy duty."

In the midst of all the commotion the only other structure inside the gate opened. It was a huge steel black box almost three feet high and six feet wide. The doors flopped open like cellar doors as two figures climbed out. It wasn't obvious from the surface, but the box descended fifty feet into the ground and hid the staircase entrance to what Jayne called the complex, but the military called Area 13.  
The media's insistence on spreading as much information as possible about Area 51 and the NORAD bases in Colorado had successfully detracted any attention from the other secret military strongholds that were spread throughout Northern America. Area 13 was named because it was supposed to be the last chance for a nation beset by catastrophe. Some general's funny idea of coincidence had christened it 13, an inherently unlucky number.

A multi-purpose missile silo, nuclear bunker, back-up archives, and fully stocked research hospital were fifty miles north of the Twin Cities. They'd become the haven for several research scientists ordered to find a cure for the disease that had ravaged the nation, and for the few survivors they'd managed to bring back with them.

Jayne saluted sharply as the two individuals crossed the grounds towards them. Dr. Sarah Cardille and Dr. Ted Fisher looked overjoyed as they saw the additional survivors.

Sarah saw the salute and nodded. "Sgt. Good to have you back."

"Good to be back." Jayne answered.

Rhodes bulled his way between them. "Dr. Cardille, we have to talk about these runs."

"Later," Sarah ignored him. "I need to talk to these people. I think that there might be different strains of the plague. I need to know what they've seen."

"The plague?" Michael spoke up from the group. "So you know it's a disease?"

Sarah looked over the four. "We think it's a disease. There's a lot we don't understand yet, but it's possible you can help us. Why don't you come underground and we'll get you up to speed."

The two doctors led the group downward as Rhodes remained behind to yell at his men. He was visibly angry at the way Sarah had blown him off, the anger visibly palpable from his posture and the way he rested his hand on the pistol at his waist.

The survivors were headed down into the darkness when Jayne held back at the last moment. She touched Rhodes gently on the wrist to get his attention, but his attitude didn't ease down. It was still full of ire and vengeance against the way he was treated.

"Hey," she tried to get his attention.

From their reconvened game at the table, Rhodes' soldiers watched them out of the corners of their eyes. Rhodes noticed and his hand thumped onto her shoulder as he steered her toward the entrance. John noticed from his position inside the cockpit, securing the chopper for the night, and his forehead wrinkled with concern.

"I want a full report on who they are. Everything. Criminal history, credit records, everything. Tell McDermott to work for a living and pull it up."

"I could run the rescue ops mys…"

"No!" He cut her off angrily. "Don't be so hasty for a promotion, Sergeant. I'm in command here, and don't you forget it."

The retort was on the tip of her tongue but she held it in. Rhodes wasn't the highest ranking officer inside of the compound, a fact he conveniently forgot. Lt. Colonel Jack Bennigan was the ranking officer, although he usually cited commander's priviledge to stay off the front lines. A chaplain who hadn't ever seen real combat, he'd been sent along as a sort of theological consultant, whom no one expected to have to take command.

"Yes, sir." She calmed her voice to be absent of any emotion, perceived or otherwise. "Background data by tonight."

"You do that." He turned away from her rudely as Jayne headed for the complex. It didn't seem to matter what unit she ended up in, the assholes always outnumbered the rest by three-to-one.

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Sarah took the survivors the long way to the conference room. She'd found that a little bit of comfort went a long way towards relaxing them and opening them up to questioning. So instead, she and Fisher led them through the two outlying tunnels towards the hospital section of Area 13. A place that they'd quickly discovered was too large for their research needs but was more than adequately equipped as a refuge camp.

Down the tunnels and through an elevator which dropped them another two levels. Here the long air vents passed upwards through soil and rock to reach the outside air and be pumped downward. But the distance wasn't obvious from the fresh, slightly breezy drafts that ran through the white walled corridors of the hospital. It helped that the filters were run by their small personal nuclear generator and dictated by research standards that required a complete air turnover every hour.

On the door that separated the hospital someone had taken down the red cross sign and hung a new one. **Big Rock Candy Mountain: Pop. 574**

Sarah laughed as she pointed at the sign. "It's a joke."

"I don't get it." Michael answered honestly.

Sarah knocked on the door and waited while it was opened from the interior. The people they'd saved were from every walk of life and some had nothing while others had dragged half their homes with them. The hospital was a strange mish-mash of decoration and haphazard design as it had filled with refugees. Brightly colored clothing was drying on lines strung across the hallways and the laughter of small children and adults echoed down corridors meant for the sick and silent.

As they entered a dark-haired man got up from behind the desk. He was pushing well past 50 years of age but still looked fit and tanned. There wasn't anything about him that spoke of authority except for his presence and the way Sarah immediately deferred to him. He smiled at the new survivors and as his head turned, several earrings glinted in the light.

"Sheriff." Sarah greeted him.

"I thought we were done with titles, Doctor."

Sarah smiled warmly at him. "That we were. I'd like you to meet our newest refugees. Just plucked off of Lake Michigan."

"Twitchers." CJ said suddenly from the back of the group.

Everyone, including the man, turned to look at CJ as he ran one hand over his balding spot. His face brightened slightly as though he finally realize he'd spoken outloud.

"You know me?" The man asked.

"You're the guy from the TV. We saw you just before the stations went out. Sheriff in some hick town." CJ's explanation reminded the others and they remembered the moment in the Panasonic store.

"Sheriff Dan Cahill." Sarah introduced him belatedly. "We pulled almost fifty families from his town.

Cahill went around the group and shook everyone's hand with a fierce pump. "Welcome to the Big Rock."

"So what does it mean?" Kenneth spoke for the first time. He still cradled the shotgun that Rhodes had forgotten to take from him. It was almost a comfort blanket to the big man and justifiably so.

The erstwhile Sheriff grinned at them, the gesture made him even more hawk-like. "There are survivors in Pittsburgh who holed up in Fiddlers Green….the safe port for sailors and cavalrymen. We didn't want to get left out. So one of the professors offered up this here name."

"And who is this place safe for?"

"Hobos, refugees, those who wander. It was a land of food, plenty of whiskey and a safe place to lay your head down. Luckily we have all three."

A strange look passed over Sarah's face at that comment but no one noticed it except for Cahill. He had already seen what went on inside the complex and was glad that it was as far away as it could get from his people.

"Anyway, Sarah and I will get you settled in." He waved at the gate guard. "Ricky, change the sign. Five hundred and seventy-eight."

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**Thanks again glocap, phantomsoldier,** **and Mainevent117. Feedback always helps. **

**As a side note, I had to include a Savini character, I couldn't help myself. Stay tuned for his fate.  
**

**Preview: Chapter 10: The Crazies - What do you do when those in command are just a little bit unhinged?**


	10. Chapter 10

**The Crazies**

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The image on the screen was as crisp as modern technology could make it. So detailed that he could see the twitch of her fingers as Sgt. Canton sat next to McDermott and tried not to reach for a cigarette. Her lips flexed on the screen as she battled with her demons and he leaned closer to watch. But in the end, her willpower won out and Lt. Col. Jack Bennigan frowned deeply as she said something to McDermott that made the both of them laugh.

"Harlot." He whispered under his breath. "She that tries to take a man's place. But Satan would want harlots in his land under the hill."

The words startled him, and surprised that he'd spoken out loud, he swiveled to check that the room was empty. It was. No one entered his office without his express approval. And he hadn't cleaned a room since his wife had married him, which was expressly obvious to anyone brave enough to try and enter. Refuse and dirty clothes were scattered in neat piles all across his office. Their neatness abandoned only when their great height toppled them over, but he wasn't about to pick them up himself, even though she was dead.

Bennigan hadn't been a real military officer, and it had nothing to do with his status as a chaplain. The military was a safe haven, nothing less. As far away as he could get from his own demons until that bitch of a woman had gotten him dragged along to this hell-hole.

There were entirely too many demons down here.

But he was tired of watching the woman. She hadn't done anything of interest except show a fondness for Captain Rhodes. Back in the day, Bennigan would have had her written up for fraternization, but nobody seemed to give a fuck anymore. She hadn't slept with the Captain yet, because he knew that too.

The thought of fraternization reminded him of Rhodes and Bennigan flipped through the channels until he found Rhodes. The Captain was sitting in the mess hall where he usually held court with three different bottles of liquor sitting in front of him. A habit the chaplain knew from experience.

Rhodes wasn't alone drinking. At least fifteen other soldiers were with him. And the state of their behavior over the video feed indicated that most of them were well beyond the limits of sobriety. At least three were scheduled to be on guard duty above ground, and would be so shit-faced at that point, that their presence was useless.

"Demons….or the damned…" The words seemed to flow out of him without any physical control and he wondered again if the entire world hadn't gone made around him. Nothing had been right since he'd seen Marie rush after him at Walter Reed. For a few seconds he couldn't tell the difference between thirty years of hateful marriage and the dead woman who was howling for his flesh.

Bennigan itched at skin grown crusty with dead cells and grime. He really should head deeper underground to the showers to bathe. But the thought of being lower, being closer to Logan's lab, creeped him out even more than going towards the surface. So he was stuck in the middle, in a kind of limbo, surrounded by death and decay and darkness. And it was harder and harder to separate those conditions from reality.

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Rhodes took another swig of straight tequila and hissed as it burned straight through his larynx. "Where did you get this shit?" He demanded angrily. "And where the fuck are the lemons?"

The man across from him belched before he took his own hearty drink. Jonas Clem was his second in command and hadn't passed an Army weight check a single time during his military career. "Blame the _doctor_." A heavy wad of spit spurted from his lips to hit the ground. "And that fucking sheriff. Wanting to ration the food, give it to all the puling brats."

"The brats have to live." The sarcasm dripped off his tongue. "They're the future."

The soldiers screamed with laughter and scorn. Not one of them gave a shit for the civilians that the scientists insisted they bring inside. Most of them were sick of the guard duty and protection detail and would rather take their chances out in the world. Taking a glass-half-full approach to the end of everything. It didn't matter that over ninety-nine percent of their colleagues were dead. In their minds they were still the most badass mother-fuckers that the Army of One had ever seen.

"Shut up." Rhodes grunted. Suddenly he was sick of them and sick of everything around them. There wasn't any fucking future, despite what Cardille, Logan and Fisher might think. And it irritated him that Canton followed them without question. She should follow him without question, as soon as he figured how to get rid of the mad-hatter old man upstairs. That problem made him reach for the tequila again until he remembered that he hated tequila without lemon. But he drank it anyway.

"You see the new bird?" Byzajowski leered. "When do we get those benefits you promised us, Captain?"

"When I fucking tell you!" Rhodes screamed across the hallway. His voice echoed in the long hall, and in the aftermath of the echoes a knock sounded at the door. "Come."

"Captain?" Jayne stepped into the hallway. She'd abandoned her ammo vest for a simple shoulder holster over an old Vietnam era jacket. But like a Marine, her name was neatly printed over the lapel pocket and she didn't look one bit out of uniform as compared to his properly dressed soldiers that looked like bums on the street. "Am I interrupting?"

"No, come in. Care for a drink?"

"Not until I'm off duty."

"_Not until she's off duty._" Came a mocking echo.

"Shut. The. Fuck. Up!" Rhodes snapped.

Jayne ignored it, it was one of the things he liked about her. As compared to the list of things he didn't like. Make that several lists. The world had gone to hell, but she still acted like things mattered. Rhodes would have liked to show her the error of her ways but since she was the only one he could trust to watch his back, he was stuck with her.

"Give me the report."

She handed him the print-out. It seemed fairly complete. What was surprising was the FBI file on the cop. Rhodes scanned through it perfunctorily.

"What's it say?" His question didn't even make her blink.

"His brother was in the Army with a top level security clearance. They had records on his entire family." She didn't have to mention that he was also former USMC, which technically meant one more for her side.

"Very well, Sgt." He gave her an imperial wave to dismiss her and was glad at least that she didn't about face. "Canton?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Has anyone been down to check on _him_ today?" He phrased the question slowly to try and catch her response but the dumb bitch didn't give him the rise he wanted. Another ding against her.

"No, sir."

"Well then," Clem said at his side. "What are you waiting for?"

Rhodes waited until she was gone before he tossed a plate at Clem. "And who told you to open your mouth?"

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"And let's see what happens when we insert this probe."

The body on the table twitched and the partially disconnected head let out a tremulous moan. Logan jotted the findings down on the pad next to him and repositioned the steel electrode within the visible brain architecture. The man strapped to the table moaned again and jerked as another current of electricity ran into him.

"Hmmm." Logan said to himself. "Didn't expect a response there."

His lab coat was covered in dried blood. Not just the smears that you expected from working in a lab, but great clots and clumps of blood from procedures that had lost any resemblance to the medical school tutorials that he'd learned off of.

"Doctor Logan?" Jayne stuck her head around the main door to the lab.

"Oh, yes, yes. Come in, Sgt. Checking on me to make sure I'm here?"

"Something like that." She hesitated less than a foot inside the room. There were mutilated chunks of zombies everywhere. Many that she'd personally collected for Logan. Now they lay in disheveled chunks from experiments that had failed. Some where he'd attempted to graft more than one together. "How are you today, sir?"

"Glad you're here." Logan held a probe out to her. "I could use a hand."

She approached him slowly and took the instrument. He guided her hand down into the gray matter of the brain and moved it into the olfactory nerve. It made a squelching sound as she pressed through a lesion that Logan had inflicted on the nerve.

"Right there." As she held it with a careful eye on the zombie below her, he pulled out a less than clean scalpel. "Don't move now, Sgt." And gashed her elbow just above the zombie's mouth and nose.

"Fuck!" She yelled but didn't move as he grabbed onto her arm with a fierce grip and held it in place. The monitor across from them began to jump and skitter as the zombie responded. Drops of blood trickled out of the cut, stained her jacket, and splattered across the dead man's chest. The restraints tightened against its body as it fought to get to this new proven source of meat.

"Doctor Logan."

Logan was surprised at the iciness of her voice. "Yes, Sgt."

"Release me."

"But look!" He was delighted with the results he was seeing. It made the entire day worthwhile. "I've just proved that there is more than one input into the olfactory nerve. Even with that lesion, it is still receiving data."

"Sir!" She jerked free then, leaving the probe still standing in the open skull. Blood continued to seep through her fingers and Logan realized that he'd cut her deeper than he'd initially thought.

But the thought had already vanished into the depths of his brain as he tried to decide where else input could be arriving from. Lesioning other sections might give him the answer.

"Oh, that's all for today, Canton." He said dismissively and turned back to the electrical stimulus. He rammed it into the zombie's brain again and again. He never paused to wonder if the moaning it caused was due to pain, or to wonder if he'd caused any to the living either. It was the fresh blood he needed to run his experiments and his own arms were already dotted with scalpel marks from his own donations to science. He'd barely nicked her.

"Ah…" he said to himself as the main lab door closed. "Let's try this."

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**Okay. All these craziness has made my brain itch. Ch. 11 has a short intro before we go back to the munchy crunchy zombie fun. Violence, chaos, and character death will ensue. **

**Official preview Ch. 11 - McDermott finds more survivors, but is there enough time to get to them before they're overrun? **


	11. Chapter 11

**Stand-off**

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The bleeding wouldn't stop.

Jayne stood in the shower and tried not to look at the swirls of blood that streaked down her arm and pooled between her toes. Damn Logan and his weirdness. She was angry at herself for getting so close to the man Rhodes called Frankenstein. And angry that the damn thing was still bleeding after 24 hours with a pressure bandage on it.

She pinched the two flaps of skin together as though will power alone would maintain the connection. The minute her fingers let go, the flesh peeled apart, and she could see the dark meat of her forearm until the bleeding refilled the space.

It hurt as water washed through it but the pain seemed to stabilize things. It made the world a little bit clearer. McDermott drank to take things out of focus, but Jayne liked them in focus. Sometimes lack of clarity led to confusion, and confusion led to deaths, sometimes more deaths than seemed logical or even right. She'd already tried life that way and it didn't work.

She dressed quickly and rewrapped the wound to keep it from staining her off-duty clothes. One day a week she got to luxuriate in blue jeans and a t-shirt, she wasn't about to blow her single set of clothes with a little bit of blood. Of course off-duty didn't mean unarmed. She wore a military issue 9mm in a hip holster, an easier draw for a woman, and it made her feel like a bit of a cowboy.

The guard outside of Big Rock grinned as she entered and she grinned back. Cahill ran a tight ship.

Inside there were a few families trying to reestablish a classroom atmosphere in the main lounge. It wasn't working as well as they wanted to think. The children had seen things that were unmentionable and some of that trauma translated to a sullen refusal to listen to their parents. The trust was gone.

"Jayne!" Cahill shouted from down the hallway. "What brings you to our neck of the woods?"

"The new woman." She brandished the bandage at him. "She's a nurse right?"

"Damn good." Cahill had a way of taking you by the arm that didn't come off as patronizing, but it still made her just a little bit uncomfortable to be handled. He turned the both of them down the right hand hallway. "I put her and her fella into 201."

They were only three feet away when the door opened and Michael stuck his head out. "Hey," he said in a breathless way. "I was napping. Have you seen Ana?"

Cahill shook his head. "Not in at least ten minutes."

Jayne stood back as the two men checked the Big Rock for her presence. Then she headed back to the front of the hospital and leaned out of the front door towards the guard. "Hey, Domingo."

"Yes, ma'am." He snapped a rough looking salute at her but dropped it when he saw the frown on her face. "What do you need?"

"The new woman. Ana. Have you seen her?"

"Oh sure." Domingo jerked his head towards the interior of the complex. "She headed out with a couple of Rhodes' men. Said they needed some kind of nursing."

"Fuck! Fuck! CAHILL!" Jayne shouted.

The sheriff's voice echoed back through the hall. "Found her?"

"The soldiers!"

Eyes jerked up everywhere in the complex. Men and women reached for their weapons as Cahill snapped orders.

Jayne was already running.

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They'd cornered Ana in the stock room five floors down, adjacent to the same tunnels that Jayne ran every day. Jayne thanked god, in case he was listening, for Bennigan and his damn surveillance cameras. And she ran.

The shouting she could hear as she rounded the last turn wasn't angry, it was baiting. They were toying with the nurse, enjoying their momentary power and savoring every second.

They'd been so arrogant that the door was open.

Jayne kicked it in the bottom corner and as it sprang open; the scene clarified instantly. Ana fighting off Clem. Four others egging him on. None with weapons out.

She sighted and shot Clem in the leg.

"Aieeee!" He screamed and went down. Blood poured out of the wound. Too much and too fast to be a flesh wound.

The others grabbed for weapons as Jayne slammed the butt of her pistol against one's head and then placed the barrel against the cheek of one still struggling to draw. The last two soldiers finally got their guns up and aimed at her.

"Shoot her!" Clem screamed.

"Ana." Jayne ignored him. "Is he bleeding to death?"

The nurse straightened her disheveled clothes before she knelt next to the soldier and checked the wound. Her face bore new scrapes and a bloodied bruise that looked like a ring had fronted the hit. She looked at him with clinical detachment and then stood to face Jayne.

"It's arterial. He only has a few minutes before he bleeds out."

"You fucking bitch!" Clem screams. He is trying to staunch the bleeding, but blood is everywhere.

"Are you okay?"

"No, I'm not fucking okay!" He cries out, but Jayne wasn't asking him.

"I'm okay." Ana turns suddenly and punt kicks Clem in the groin. He doubles over white and let's go of the bleeder. "Now, I'm better."

"Save him." Says the soldier closest to Jayne. His gun is pointed, not at her head, but at center of mass. If he was her soldier she'd have taught him the right place to aim his weapon, but that was Rhodes job, not hers. And she'd been soft when she shot Clem. She should have blown his brains all over the wall.

"No."

"We'll kill you."

"And I'll kill him." She presses the 9 mil harder into the soldier's head. "And Clem will die too. So I get the highest kill. Take that to the bank."

"We'll kill her too." The second soldier threatens Ana with his weapon.

"And then you'll be dead." Cahill steps into the room backed by half the occupants of Big Rock and the other survivors. "It's a no win situation."

The two soldiers look at Clem dying on the floor and the numbers arrayed against them. "Fuck. But save him at least."

Cahill regarded Ana carefully. He'd seen injuries like hers before and knew that some things couldn't be forgiven. "It's your call, sweetheart."

In the end, Ana knelt to help Clem. Jayne eased off the trigger and thrust the soldier away from her.

"We need to have a…."

"Jayne! Jayne!" The bellowing voice echoed off the walls as McDermott ran toward them. He was waving radios in both hands. "You've got to get in the air. North Fork is being overrun! They can't hold them off much longer. You've got to go!"

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**Well, I am a Day junkie. But the story will be going aboveground for a while. And you'll find out that Jayne isn't as perfect as she seems.**

**Ch.12 - What do you do when a group of survivors is being overrun? Ride to the rescue, of course. **


	12. Chapter 12

**Here Come the Cavalry – Part I **

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"Big Rock is on lockdown until we get back." Cahill told Jayne and Rhodes as the three of them loaded up in the armory. There'd been no time to change so all three were throwing weapons over their civilian clothes. He caught the ammo vest that she tossed him and shrugged it on.

"So they were having a little fun." Rhodes didn't seem too stressed by the events. "I still think shooting Clem was overrated."

Jayne quirked one eyebrow but didn't say anything. She thought shooting him was underrated. He was currently in surgery with Ana and a set of armed guards, just in case. She strapped on a pair of shin guards from their riot gear stash and was adjusting the bracers on her forearms when she saw two of the survivors at the door.

Kenneth waited for her to acknowledge him and CJ.

"What's up?" She asked.

"We want to help." He answered, his shotgun was still cradled in his arms, and at the moment he looked more military than she did. "I was a cop and a Marine before that. I saw action in Africa and the Middle East."

Jayne nodded. She wasn't about to fight him on that. Able bodied fighters were in short supply, ones that she could trust, even shorter. "And _his_ qualifications?"

CJ pushed the baseball cap he'd found back on his head. "Redneck."

Cahill smothered a laugh next to her. "At least the boy's honest."

"Load up." She indicated the armory lockers. "Rotors are cycling. DeWayne is going to try to clear some outlying areas for us, but we're going in hot. Aerial rescue is going to be a bitch but we can only land one chopper at a time."

"How do we keep them off the people there?" CJ asked. His eyes gleamed with excitement as he lifted a machine gun.

"Mini-guns." Rhodes answered quickly before Jayne could. He was irritated at how quickly everyone seemed to dismiss him and his control of the situation. "Then the troops maintain the ground situation while I direct the rescue from the choppers."

Jayne and Cahill caught the sidelong glance that Kenneth gave them.

Rhodes continued. "But I don't want any fuck-ups. So you listen to everything I tell you."

"Roger that." Jayne answered smartly. "Let's go."

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They had to run down two miles of hallways to get to the elevator they needed. The huge service car groaned as it lifted them back toward the surface. As it breached the top floor it ground to a halt and opened onto a huge hangar bay.

Kenneth and CJ were speechless and awed at the size. Jayne ignored them and jogged towards the four CH-3E Super Stallions on the helicopter pads. One of the pilots spotted them and waved out the window. The four other soldiers and two Marines were already on board.

As they approached Jayne pushed Kenneth toward Cahill. She had to shout louder to be heard over the multiple rotors. "Go with Cahill. CJ! You're with me."

They climbed inside of the chopper painted with a buxom brunette, 50's style pin-up, and labeled: _Doreen_. Except that no woman named Doreen had ever had a set of knockers like that, not in the 50's anyway.

She pulled the door shut behind them and gave the pilot a thumbs up as she pulled a radio set on. "We're go, fly-boy."

John gently applied force to the control and the chopper lifted off as the roof above them began to open. The hangar bay wasn't above ground level, only the roof breached the soil, and as it opened zombies began to fall through.

"Aren't you worried about them?" CJ asked.

"Nope." She answered but didn't specify as the blue sky appeared above them.

John let the helicopter rise slowly but everyone on board could hear him singing the Weather Girls softly. "_It's raining men, hallelujah. Oh, it's raining men, amen."_

And just like the song, bodies fell from the sky.

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North Fork was an hour by chopper but they could see the smoke rising a half hour out. Visibility was ten miles on the deck and turning into a nice summer day. Jayne crawled into the copilot chair and rigged into the outgoing communications line.

"…el…bombs are helping…..ow long….until you….put him down!"

Jayne listened to the scattered commentary with a frown. She found the printout that John had placed on the floorboards and scanned the information with a worried eye. North Fork had refused any help. It was located centrally on a reservation and they'd thought they had everything in hand. The local police force was strong and the tribe well armed. As far as Jayne remembered, they'd locked the rez down faster than half the world. Trouble this late in the game didn't bode well.

"How many?" John asked softly. He'd quit singing about five minutes after take-off.

"There were twelve hundred survivors."

He whistled under his breath. At their heaviest, they'd only be able to lift out 150 people tops, maybe more if they were children. That still left a lot behind.

"They had some heavy trucks. If we can beat back the assault we might be able to load the adults. Lift the children out."

"Lotta smoke in the sky. DeWayne is finding a lot to shoot at."

"Channel 5?" John nodded and Jayne switched her headset to that frequency. "DeWayne, this is Jayne. Come back."

"I copy you fine, Jayne. You want a sitrep?" The jet pilot's voice was grim.

"Only if you've got good news."

A short laugh barked over the airwaves. "Wouldn't that be the day. I've cleared as much of the outlying areas as I can. Margin of error is too narrow for me to drop anything closer to their problem zones. They've had three wall breaches. Lots of walkers. Maybe a couple thousand. They're trying to rebuild the wall, but there's just too much pressure. Over."

"I copy that." She sat back with a worried look on her face. "John, tell Kirk that I want the mini-guns going in first. We've got to weed some of that crowd down."

-----------

The two armed Super Stallions came in low over North Fork. The compound that they were trying to protect was ringed by huge steel fences that had been cemented into the ground. But now they were bowing and starting to break. The men and women of North Fork were trying to defend against the attack while putting up new barriers but they were sorely outnumbered. They both swung around while the remaining two choppers went in high and headed straight for the helicopter pad on top of the hospital.

Rhodes was in one of the Super Stallions that carried mini-guns. He ordered the other bird to go in low and clean out the fencing area as they hovered further off the perimeter wall. The _chudda-chudda-chudda_ of the mini-guns started to boom out. Huge rounds mowed into the crowd and the empty casings burned out of the ejection chamber. Some of the newer zombies managed to sustain one to two hits, but the older ones were felled in threes and fours as the ammunition burst through rotted flesh.

He and Kenneth opened the other door so that he could get a better look at the ground situation. Cahill was up front in the co-pilot seat to direct the firing.

Rhodes grimaced at he looked out at the battle. His professional opinion was that those on the ground were fucked. His personal opinion was exactly the fucking same.

"What the hell is he doing?" Kenneth grabbed Rhodes' arm and pointed at the other chopper. It was drifting backwards, directly toward the perimeter fence.

"Fuck!" Rhodes spit. "Kirk, pull up! Pull the fu---!"

The rear rotor struck the fence. Sparks flew and the first blade snapped down. It clanged against the metal and snapped in two. But instead of flying away the metal tore through the fuselage. Two more blades hit the fence and tore into zombies and the three human defenders who were too close. Blood misted behind the Super Stallion as it hesitated for one second, the top rotors still fighting to keep it in the air, and then it pivoted downward and drove into the ground.

The explosion blasted outward from it.

They didn't have any time on the other chopper. The concussive shock struck them with physical force and heat. Rhodes was thrown into the seats so hard that he gashed his arm across a tiny piece of metal hard enough to bleed. Kenneth and the gunner were both lifted off their feet and pitched out the side of the Stallion as it canted sideways.

A fifteen foot fall.

The gunner hit bare concrete head first and snapped his neck a millisecond before the impact pulverized his face. Kenneth wind-milled as he went down, his arms flailing against the sky, and hit three zombies with their faces turned up to the sky. The impact knocked all of them to the ground and the big cop didn't move.

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**To be continued...**

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	13. Chapter 13

**Here Come the Cavalry – Part II**

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"What the hell!" Cahill leapt back into the bay of the Stallion as the pilot pulled them away from the inferno that was the other chopper. Another explosion rocked them as the reserve fuel tanks lit up, and decimated both the zombies on the ground and a larger section of fencing.

He peered out of the chopper at the bodies on the ground. "Kenneth? Are you okay?"

"He's dead." Rhodes snapped and leaned toward the cockpit. "Get us out of here."

"No wait!" Cahill stared again as he saw the big black man twitch. They'd cleared many of the walkers out of the area, but there were still enough to cause problems and they had begun to move toward the open section of fence and Kenneth's body.

Kenneth twitched again on the ground and began to slowly try to get off the ground. He'd had all the air knocked out of him on impact, and despite the great desire to survive, he couldn't move at first. It was incredibly painful to pull the shotgun out from underneath him. And even more painful to realize that the stock hadn't survived the fall to the ground. It was shattered into two pieces.

"Hang on!" Cahill shouted from above him.

The chopper began to descend slowly. But the zombies were closer. He was weaponless except for the demolished shotgun. "When in doubt, improvise." He muttered and flipped the barrel in his hands.

The first zombie to reach him was only waist high and for a second he paused. It looked like a child until he saw the bowed legs and disproportionate head, not a child, a midget. He drew the barrel back in a classic batter's stance and let loose. Barry Bonds, who was most likely dead, couldn't have made a better drive. The shotgun butt crunched through teeth and cartiledge with a satisfying crack. The man's body spun four times before it hit the ground.

He glanced up at the chopper but it was still five feet above him. A matronly housewife, still attired in the muumuu she'd died in, rushed him. One pendulous breast flopped by a few folds of skin and Kenneth gagged at the sight of the bite marks deep in her stretch marks. The makeshift cudgel whistled through the air and took her right above the ear. But even with all his weight behind it, it didn't spin her as satisfyingly at the midget. She just dropped.

The wheels of the Super Stallion were head height and there wasn't any time left. At least twenty more zombies were close enough that he couldn't fight them all off. Kenneth abandoned his precious shotgun and leapt for the door of the chopper where Rhodes and Cahill were waiting to grab a hold of him.

As he scrambled to get in, hands caught his boots and the wheels of the chopper. He kicked backwards to break free, but they had him tight. While Rhodes pulled in one direction, the dead behind him pulled in the other.

"They've got me!" He shouted to the two men.

Cahill grinned as he pulled a huge revolver from his holster and leaned out over Kenneth's back. The three separate shots relieved the pressure on his ankle and Kenneth lunged to safety.

But it wasn't over.

As Kenneth lay sprawled on the floor, Cahill leaned out just a little bit further to shoot a woman who was trying to crawl onto the chopper. The chopper tilted slightly as the pilot started to raise them back into the air, and Rhodes saw his one and only opportunity. He brought his pistol down on Cahill's arm, the one that was supporting all of the sheriff's weight.

Cahill's hand opened reflexively and gravity pulled him forward onto the waiting zombies. Like a great white's jaw closing on prey, they fell onto the man before he had a chance to scream.

"Cahill!" Rhodes shouted. "Cahill!"

Kenneth heaved himself to his feet but there was nothing underneath the zombies except for the grisly sounds of flesh under teeth. A single muted scream came from the pile and then they were up in the air.

"What happened?" Kenneth demanded. "He was right there."

Rhodes looked away so that Kenneth couldn't see him lie. "I think his hand slipped. It just happened so fast." He hoped that the slight tremor in his voice would pass for sorrow, and not the fact that one of his main rivals had just vanished into the maw of the dead.

They could both hear Jayne's voice over the radio as she demanded to know what was going on.

The dark-haired man turned toward the radio and wondered for a moment if this was the right time to play the card he had on Cahill and Jayne. But then he decided against it. Kenneth didn't trust him yet, and probably wouldn't believe the truth, especially if he told it on the heels of a man's death. The fact that the late sheriff and Jayne Canton had fomented mutiny and murder in the first two weeks of their residence in the complex was worth believing in.

"Ringo," he told the pilot. "Get us to the evacuation. There's nothing more we can do here."

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**No little people or fat ladies were harmed in the writing of this chapter. :O**

**Ch13 preview: Good deeds never go unpunished. **

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	14. Chapter 14

**All Your Sorrows Avenged – Part I**

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The little girl in Jayne's arms cried out for her mother as she was stuffed in the troop compartment of the Super Stallion, but there was no more room for the woman. The diminutive Native American woman shushed the child and kissed her as they drew the door closed. Inside women, some heavily pregnant, sat with two and three children on their laps. The atmosphere was already stifling with the crying and sickly smell of diapers but they'd gotten over sixty on board.

Jayne pushed the woman backwards so that John could lift off and waved to the other chopper to begin its descent. The wind spun her hair out of its braid and she fussed with it for a moment before she gave up. Strands snapped against her cheeks and eyes and she brushed back tears from the stinging contact.

She crouched down on the roof and tried to hear the commentary on the radio. Something had gone horribly wrong on the fence line but she couldn't see anything except for the smoke. Whatever it was, it had cleared the zombies long enough that the North Fork people had been able to make it to the three semi-trucks parked against the back line of their property. Even now, they were being loaded with every person mobile enough to make it.

A shadow cast over her and she jumped as something descended onto her head. CJ held up a hand in defense as she reached for her pistol.

"For your hair." He said apologetically and she realized that it was his hat. He'd already started to snug it onto her head but it was cock-eyed.

She gave him a grim smile and pulled it on tighter, it did help with the errant strands. "How many more?"

He'd been counting those waiting on the roof. "Another thirty kids. A couple of old folks who aren't going to make a trip in the semis. And another forty or so women. Some of their kids just went up on the chopper."

Jayne did the math in her head and realized they'd be lucky to get everyone on the two remaining birds. The second chopper hit the ground and she stopped thinking about it as she and CJ began to load the next batch of people. As she was securing an elderly man next to his wife the pilot craned his head around toward her.

"Jayne?"

"Yeah." She answered with half an ear.

"That was Kirk's bird that went down." He took a deep breath. "We lost Ben, and Dan Cahill, out of the other chopper."

Her hand froze on the seat harness. The words razored through her brain with such lethality that she forgot how to breathe or think for a moment. If asked, she would have sworn that her blood crystallized inside her body and then shattered.

"Cahill?"

"Ringo couldn't tell me the details, but he's gone."

"Fuck me," she hissed. The older couple gave her an askance look but Jayne would have told them to fuck off if she had noticed. Cahill was the reason she didn't have to worry about the civilians they brought back to the Big Rock. He kept them inside, except for those who forgot to listen or were lured out like Ana. And now he was dead. Just like everyone else she had known.

She got back out numbly.

"Jayne? Jayne?" It took her a second to realize that Hawkes was saying her name and she realized belatedly that not only was Cahill dead, but that Jimenez had gone down with four other soldiers on Kirk's chopper. And the numbness dissipated and anger replaced it.

"Get the rest of the civilians loaded." She snapped at him and pulled a rifle from inside the door of the chopper. "I want the other bird down and filled in five minutes."

"Where are you going?"

But she was already walking, then jogging, then running towards the roof top entrance to the hospital. CJ saw her leaving and began to run after her.

"Where are you going?"

She whirled back on him and her eyes flashed with anger. "Don't follow me. I won't be responsible for your death."

"You can't go alone." But even as he said the words, CJ realized how much he'd changed since that first day in the mall. If he had to, he would have sworn that the end of the world had made him a better man.

"Bullshit."

Jayne wasn't like any woman he'd ever met. She confused him a little bit and it startled him that he wanted to protect her, even though she didn't seem to need protecting. She stood there defiant in front of him, sweat stained and windblown and he realized he'd never seen anything more beautiful in his entire life.

"Why would you help me?"

He shrugged, life passed faster in this new world and he'd never been good at beating around the bush. "I like you."

Something flickered across her face but he couldn't define the emotion. She glanced away from him as the second chopper rose heavily into the sky and the third one began to descend. Rhodes spoke across the line and she ripped the comm. unit from her ear and cast it across the rooftop.

"This is going to be suicide." She said softly to him. "I made a promise and I'm going to keep it, no matter what's waiting for me."

"Okay."

She stepped close to him and CJ caught his breath. "You don't know anything about me. Who I am or what I've done. What you've seen isn't everything. I wouldn't have you die for the girl you think I am."

"I'm going to make sure that I get to meet that woman." He grinned at her. "So enough bullshitting. Let's go." A pause. "What are we going to do?"

"To kill Cahill." She opened the door to the roof and started downward. He kept at her side as they descended the stairs. "When I made him that damn promise I guess I figured that we'd be together at the end."

"So you and he?"

"No," Jayne turned and stopped him in the stairway. For a moment, there was no sound as though the world outside was gone. For that long breathe, it was just the two of them. Her eyes met his and she reached up and kissed him deeply. Their bodies crashed together and he could feel her fingers dig into the meat of his back. His own were pressed hard against the small of her back. There was nothing but this, and the passion wiped away any of the fear in his mind. He'd go to hell and back for this woman, just for another kiss.

When she released him to take a breath there was a small smile on her lips. "You're sure?" She asked again.

"Trust me." CJ said. The damn magazine had been right. "I'm going to be right next to you."

They reached the ground floor and her hand paused on the handle. She surveyed her weapons and took the safety off of the pistol on her hip and the rifle in her hands. He'd already cocked the shotgun and was ready to go.

"What do you see in me?"

The question wasn't what he expected. He thought she was going to ask if he was ready to go. "You remind me of this girl I had a crush on in first grade."

"I remind you of a six year old?" Her voice had a funny note in it.

"She kicked me in the balls that year…but she grew up mighty pretty."

Jayne laughed and shoved the exit open.

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	15. Chapter 15

**All Your Sorrows Avenged – Part II**

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The reservation survivors had set up a clear zone around the truck loading so Jayne and CJ jogged in relative safety to the edge of the zone. Beyond them, a temporary barrier was stretched across the burnt section of fence that supported the burnt hulk of the downed chopper. Flames still licked and spat inside of the wreck.

"Can you take the shot from inside?"

She sighted down her rifle towards the crowd of dead outside the barrier. The crosshairs swung across the faces, some mutilated and torn, some remarkably untouched except for the elements. But of Cahill, there was no sign.

"Jesus." CJ pointed across the field to where the older man shambled on one broken leg and one that consisted of nothing but raw bone and the scrapes of human teeth. He'd be at the fence except that his travel was slow and too far for Jayne to get him. "We'll be here all afternoon."

"You could cover me from that wall." Jayne pointed to the half completed brick wall to their left. "He's about three hundred yards, so about three minutes to go there are back."

"You're going to outrun them?" CJ wasn't sure he'd heard her right. She was fast, he'd seen that during their fuel run, but it was still suicide. There were enough fresh zombies outside the wall to give her chase. "And I stay on the safe side? Aren't we switching roles?"

"CJ." There was such seriousness in her face that the protective urge swept over him again. "I promised Cahill this, not you."

"And I promise that you're coming back from this." He brushed his hand along her chin. "There's not a fucking thing that you can do to change my mind."

She acquiesced finally and they maneuvered a fifteen foot ladder over to the wall. The second ladder they tipped over the top, it teetered as though it would fall, but then caught against a set of tines. Jayne regarded their flimsy plan with a frown. It was suicide no matter how she looked at it. She only had to get close enough to kill Cahill but then they had to make the run back and get back over the fence.

Her lips moved slightly as she counted the zombies on the other side. Fifteen close enough to hit. The rifle hit her shoulder and bucked as she opened up on automatic. Shots peppered those zombies and CJ's gun barked a few feet away from them. As the last zombie took a bullet in the left eye and dropped - they were on the ladder.

The fence clattered under their feet but neither of them bothered with the ladder on the other side. The drop jarred through their knees and Jayne reacted a split second faster than CJ, but she'd had an entire month of running that he hadn't. The difference between life in relative freedom and a cell.

He concentrated on the situation around them. They had the attention of the zombies who wandered through the blackened cement and wreckage around the crash. Two children, who were faster than the adults, ran on an intercept course, anticipating where Jayne and CJ were headed. But Jayne was on a single track.

Her entire world narrowed down to the man in front of them. Cahill hadn't died easily. The zombies, desparate for fresh meat, had ripped huge chunks from his face, neck and chest. One shoulder was completely gone and his stomach was less than a millimeter shy of spilling out his intestines. And then there was the destruction of his lower body.

Cahill glanced up at them and hissed. Zombie rot already coated his eyes and his gums bled with dark blood.

CJ shot at the children and missed both of them. "Fuck!"

Jayne was almost to Cahill and she raised the rifle and shot him twice at point blank range even as the sheriff reached for her. The first shot blew out the back of his head, the second just enlarged the hole. The hiss froze on his lips and Jayne would have sworn they relaxed into a thankful expression as he toppled to the pavement.

"Jayne!" CJ shouted again.

She spun and the rifle spat out on automatic. The children took lead across the chests and the force knocked them backwards onto the pavement. They didn't bother to check if the shots were fatal. He grabbed her hand and pulled her with him as they ran for the fence.

But speed wasn't on their side. Zombies were closing on the ladder. He dropped her hand and shot as fast as he could pull the trigger. It clicked on an empty chamber and he slammed another magazine home as Jayne shot past him with the rifle. They were almost to the ladder when he felt something touch his back.

"Go!" He shouted to her, and turned to shoot what was behind them.

Jayne screamed as she missed a head shot and a zombie latched onto her arm. Teeth gnashed against the bracers on her forearm, and he turned to help her. He shot the zombie so close that the bullet burned across her forearm as it exited the zombie's head. And at the same moment, he felt the sharp sting of teeth on his back.

He bit his teeth against the pain and dragged the zombie off of him. It was the little boy, still wearing a Disney Lion King t-shirt and red shorts. But the bites on his arms were small and matched the little girl only a few feet behind him. CJ put bullets through both of their brains and reached back to touch the blood soaked section of his shirt.

"Well, that fucks all." He said softly.

"CJ?"

He turned back to her with an apologetic smile. "You should get over the ladder."

"No."

The strangled cry broke his heart. "It's the end of the road." He told her softly.

Jayne snarled, a sound as feral as any zombie and slammed another magazine into her rifle. She moved in front of him and clicked off full automatic to semi. The zombies that were on their way were blown into mush as an automaton took over the woman in front of him. This was not something he could protect, this was a side of her he hadn't seen, a side capable of murder. And it startled him that she would change so completely because of him.

And then the moment was gone as the last zombie fell.

The bleeding thickened and he feel queasy from the loss. He started to go down as she caught him.

"Oh god, CJ." Her voice was hoarse as she looked at the injury. "This wasn't supposed to happen. You weren't supposed to die for me."

"Life's a bitch." He tried to joke.

"No." She kissed him again and CJ realized that this was worth it. For this moment, he would have climbed over the wall again and again and again.

"I wanted to know you. This wasn't supposed to end."

"You do know me."

"No." Tears spilled from her eyes. She hadn't cried for Cahill but she wept for him. "This isn't fair."

"Go over the wall." He grasped her waist and pulled them both to their feet. "Now before it's too late." He kissed her again as a bitter taste coated his tongue and hoped that she couldn't taste the imminent death as he could. "You know, it figures." One finger trembled as he tried to wipe away the hot tears on her cheeks. "I quit being a selfish bastard and I still end up getting screwed."

"CJ." She whispered.

"Go." He tried to smile at her. "Go now."

She turned and kicked the ladder away from the wall. It hit the ground with a clatter of metal on concrete. He choked slightly as he realized what she was doing.

"You don't owe me anything."

"Except for this." She said to him as she embraced him one last time. "If this is it, I owe you this."

It was too late but he didn't have the energy to tell her. He bent over with a harsh racking cough as the blood drained out of the bite to his kidney. There was so much he still wanted to do, so much to….and he died.


	16. Chapter 16

**All Your Sorrows Avenged – Part III**

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He lunged at her. Jayne tripped and fell under the onslaught. Her eyes were full of tears and she could barely see through them as she held off the man on top of her. His teeth snapped only centimeters from her skin and whatever had been CJ heard nothing of her screams as he tried to eat her alive.

She got a foot between them and shoved him backwards. He landed on his feet only two steps away from her. His mouth opened wide as he rushed her and Jayne shoved her 9mm straight into his jaw and pulled the trigger, and kept pulling it until the empty clicks resounded in her brain. He lay dead, truly dead on the ground.

"WHY?" She screamed suddenly and dropped to her knees. All of the losses crashed down upon her and she felt as though she would break under their weight. "WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING THIS TO US?"

The sky didn't answer.

The zombies kept coming.

She reached into her ammo vest and pulled out new clips. One went between her teeth as she loaded the other. She got back to her feet even though her soul had gone numb.

A runner was on his way. A Native American man from the rez who'd died with his face still painted for a ceremony. Obviously they'd tried to pray away the disease like everyone else. The fact that their spirits had failed to answer hit Jayne harder than she would have thought. But it didn't stop her from stepping up to the man and pistol whipping him across the face.

It smashed the man away from her but he popped right back up.

Jayne decided in a heartbeat that a bullet wasn't enough. She hit him again, and again, and again until there was nothing but mush left to his face. Still he came. So she grabbed onto his ears and wrestled him to the ground. She'd dropped her gun in the process, but didn't notice as she smashed his head into the pavement. Blood and brains splattered up across his arms and chest with every blow. She screamed as she hammered his skull down. The bone shattered and then shattered again as she smashed it down.

Her knuckles scraped across the ground and started to bleed. She noticed vaguely that her arm had ripped open again and bled through the bandage there. And then, hazily, that there was nothing left of the zombie to hit.

She swept the gun up and blew the brains out of a runner who had just reached her. More were coming. More souls to be avenged. More bodies to take her overwhelming anger out on.

There was nothing but the battle as she killed and killed and killed. They were just zombies, there was nothing human left to them.

Jayne kicked a woman down and then shot her. As she glanced up she realized that she'd been wrong. She'd drawn too much attention. Too many zombies were coming. She checked her vest and found a single clip left.

It wouldn't be enough. Unless she ended everything right now. She looked down at the gun and wondered why it mattered to delay the inevitable. She cocked the trigger for one last time and started to raise it toward her own head.

Arms grabbed her from behind and she screamed.


	17. Author's Note

**Author's note:**

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**So my house flooded in the torrential rain. Blah. It might take me a couple more days to update so for those of you still reading...more is coming.

In answer to a question of where this is all going ----- Pittsburgh of course. I knew it had to go there after I heard one of Cholo's lines in LOTD. The question is, who will actually make it that far?

A random point about why I'm mixing everything together. I never understood the arguments about the timeline. GAR said they weren't sequels. Hence, in my world, they're all happening at the same time. Just my POV on the matter.

Thanks again for reading. And I didn't really kill Cahill and CJ - the zombies did it. :O

More mayhem and massacres to follow.


	18. Chapter 17

**Truth – Part I**

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Six months later…

Kenneth could hear the biting retort of a sniper rifle even six flights of stairs away from the top of the complex. Above him a tiny cut of sunlight shone down into the darkness. He kept on climbing. He'd been doing a lot of running since they'd officially become part of the complex and it showed. He'd lost some of the doughnut weight from the force and it made the stairs a piece of cake.

He blinked as he reached the top of the stairs and exited into the area just above. There were supposed to be three soldiers on guard duty but they were noticeably absent. Only Jayne and Hawkes, who still refused to acknowledge that he had a first name, were outside. The narrow lipped sniper watched as Jayne shot the bolt home on the sniper rifle and put her eye back to the scope. She was perched on a makeshift hunter's mount they'd built when the zombies outside their walls had gotten too numerous. There were enough people inside the complex who needed target practice to make a permanent shooting stage worthwhile.

There were at least sixty zombies around the perimeter fence and another thirty bodies on the ground that attested to how long she'd been out there.

He could see her follow a zombie slightly and take the shot. The crack echoed a millisecond after the zombie lost the top of his head. The older man gave them a confused look as his brain tasted air for the first time in his life. He toppled to the pavement as Jayne cursed the off-center hit. She wasn't as good as Andy, but then Andy had been pretty damn good. If there'd been more time, maybe Kenneth would have actually known how Andy had gotten to be so good, but that was wishful thinking.

Hawkes turned and saw Kenneth. "Hey, man."

"Where are the duty soldiers?"

"I relieved them." Jayne muttered as she started to focus in on another target. "They'd been drinking again before shift."

"Oh."

Hawkes scooped up the water bottle next to his foot and patted Jayne on the shoulder before he headed toward the staircase. "I gotta piss." He said to Kenneth in explanation.

Kenneth dropped his voice low. He liked Jayne, she'd seemed like a straight shooter from the first moment on the lake, but CJ's death had done something to her. Made her quieter and less willing to fight Rhodes on the bullshit details he tried to foster on the Big Rock inhabitants. When he thought about it, he remembered that it had been a one-two punch, Cahill had also died that day. "How's she doing?"

The sniper shrugged slightly. "Well, she's no natural. But there's something to be said for persistence and practice."

Jayne took another shot as Hawkes vanished underground and Kenneth approached her. The shooting stage was just over five feet tall, which meant that he could easily stand next to it and talk to her.

"What do you want?" She beat him to the first word.

"Jayne."

"Motherfucker at seven o'clock." She swiveled and the .50 cal vaporized the swaying corpse of a pregnant woman and then punched through the two zombies behind her. Only the first was a head shot, so the latter strikes kept moving, swaying, and moaning. Arms reached through the chain-link towards what they could only vaguely perceive as food.

"Ana said you went back off the antibiotics again."

"Yes, I did." She didn't even bother to lie to him.

"You know." Kenneth leaned his arms against the stage, his USMC tattoo showed up against the curve of his bicep. An old tattoo but one he was proud of. "There are easier ways to die."

**_Crack_**. "Who said I wanted to die?"

"I had this conversation once, about why we deserved to live when everyone we knew had died. It didn't mean anything to me at the time, and not until later did I admit that other people die and we are just so fucking happy that it was them – and not us." There wasn't silence when he stopped talking, the zombies saw to that, but Jayne was motionless, her finger paused on the trigger. "Cause its really hard to admit something like that, especially when its your friends who are dead."

"That's not it." She said the words but he didn't believe her. Denial was something near and dear to all of their hearts. It was the end of the world after all.

"He wasn't alwa…."

"That's not it."

Kenneth was surprised to hear the agony in her voice. Jayne was usually as tough as they came, almost as emotionless as the damn doctor downstairs.

"You don't understand."

"Then explain it to me."

A strange look crossed over the Sergeant's face. Memories that she hadn't relived in a long time. She sighted down on another zombie but the shot went wild and thunked into a tree over a thousand yards away. The miss didn't connect in her brain as she tried to set up another shot through eyes that she refused to believe were misted with tears.

"He died because he thought I was someone I'm not." A catch broke in her throat and she swallowed at the painful tightening of the muscles. "Someone I pretended to be because I needed to have people trust me out there. It was all a fucking lie."

"Tell me."

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_"Sir, there are survivors out there. Survivors that we need to get to." _

_ "So take the jeeps out the back door." _

_ Jayne Canton was fully dressed in Marine Corps camoflauge. For an intelligence specialist she had fallen capably into the new role required of her. Of course, a unit that had pushed Marine Corps duties above all else had helped. It made her a better shooter and ready for the incessant warfare of the dead against the living, but they were outnumbered, and every trip outside that they used the Jeeps meant that a few less Marines and soldiers made it back every night. _

_ "General." She tried again. "Permission to speak freely." _

_ "Will you hear it from someone not in your chain of command?" Cahill snapped. He was fresh to the complex, rescued less than two days earlier, but he'd stepped into his role of civilian protector easily. He'd also made it his imperative to rescue as many others as possible. If there was no way to stop the flood of dead, then he had to try and rescue the living. _

_ General McMahon wasn't listening to either of them. He shared a grimace with the Colonel who acted as his adjutant. _

_ "Sir." Canton protested again. "Permission to…" _

_ "No, Sergeant." The General was already thinking about the vixen they'd rescued yesterday. A hot young thing who'd already made it clear that she'd do just about anything to stay in the favor of those in power. The girl gave head like she was training for an Olympic competition and it was nice to know that there were still perks in this shit hole of an assignment. _

_ "Sir, I lost six men last run. If we don't use the choppers to get some distance between us and the zombies…we won't last another month." _

_ "Hush." The Colonel gave her a nasty look. Enlisted were to be seen, not heard, and to die on command. That was their entire point. A philosophy the old school had instilled in him. Anything Canton said was not worth their time. _

_ "Six men." She repeated softly. "We're dying out there." _

_ "Aren't the dead getting back up?" The Colonel snapped. "It's your shoddy leading that is losing us men. I'm not sure why the Lieutenant seems to trust you. _A woman_." _

_ Her eyes blinked slowly but other than that she let the comment wash past her. He hated that about her. In the corner Rhodes grinned at the words but remained silent. The Colonel liked Rhodes and his men. Soldiers should stick together, especially now. The addition of a Marine contingent to their force had been unnecessary, and with their attrition rate, soon obsolete. It was just a matter of time. _

_ "No choppers, Sergeant. I will not waste equipment on your team." _

_ **Snip. **_

_The sound of the gunshot was muted in the underground chamber. The last syllables to leave the General's lips remained frozen there as he teetered. A tiny bullet hole entered his head. A huge exit wound gaped open where it exited. Blood and brains splattered through the air and onto the floor. His body wavered for a second, barely moved by the bullet's passage. _

_ "YOU BITCH!" The Colonel shrieked. He went for his gun and fumbled it in the holster. _

_ "No." Cahill's revolved thumped against the side of the Colonel's head. "You're the bastard." _

_ The Colonel never felt the point blank gunshot that ended his life. Everything went white in a single blink and he hit the floor. _

_ Silence reigned in the aftermath. Blood drops coated Cahill's face and he wiped them off mutely as they waited for Rhodes to respond. _

_ The Captain shrugged slightly and took another pull out of the flask he had in one pocket. "Another day on the monkey farm." _

_Jayne looked down at the gun in her hand and leveled it at Rhodes. "Do you have any fucking problem with the way things are going to change?"_

_"Nope. You in command now?"_

_"Fuck no." Jayne dropped her aim away from him and reholstered the weapon. "I'm just sick and fucking tired of dying out there while perfectly good choppers sit there. This is your gig. You run it." She passed Cahill and locked eyes with the older man. "Sheriff." And she walked out of the room without looking back._

_

* * *

_

"That's who I am." Jayne said softly. "I shot him in cold blood. And we rounded up the chopper pilots and DeWayne in his fucking jet and told them how things were going to be from that point out. Rhodes had command, but we weren't losing any more fucking men to the General and his incompetence."

Kenneth digested the story slowly. He'd heard worse things. He'd known a guy who'd gone to Somalia and shot four villagers because they'd caught him taking a piss behind a building. A single moment of vulnerability that had been avenged in spades. He'd seen CJ refuse to help them the day of the outbreak. He'd seen Steve leave their only exit shut and unguarded as they'd run back through the tunnels. He'd given up on his brother even when his heart had told him to keep searching. Jayne's story wasn't entirely unexpected.

"Do you want to know the worst part?"

He waited. It was almost a rhetorical question.

"I never regretted it. I'd kill the General again if I needed to." The tears that were contained in her eyes, that she'd fought to hard to keep inside, spilled out onto her cheeks. "I told CJ I wasn't worth dying for. And he went anyway. Goddamn him. He went anyway."

Kenneth reached out and folded his arms around her as she sobbed. Her fingers clenched and unclenched as seven months of pent up anguish forced their way out. "Maybe." He contemplated the words he wanted to say. They weren't always his strong suit and giving comfort wasn't either, but she needed it, and in some ways, he did too. "Maybe… he thought you were."


	19. Chapter 18

**Lies – Part II**

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* * *

**

Sarah knocked on Bennigan's door and waited for a response. There was nothing, no sound at all from inside of the room, but the odor that crept out had a physical presence. She gagged slightly as she stepped away from it. Her movement jostled Clem who looked uphappy to be included in the party. He'd actually managed to put on so much weight that there wasn't a uniform in the complex that could fit him. On Sarah's other side was a fiercely determined Ana. The blonde had grown stronger in the weeks at the complex and even Clem shot her wary looks from time to time. Hawkes had spent almost as much time tutoring Ana as he had Jayne and the others, but none of them were as good as the former nurse.

Ana wore two pistols, one strapped bandolero style across her chest. Her hair was swept up into a ponytail and she waited patiently for Sarah to open the door.

"Bennigan?" Sarah called again.

"Let's go." Ana bounced on her toes.

Sarah nodded. A huge set of keys made a solid and literal weight in her hands as she examined them and then inserted a single silver key. They door protested the intrusion and held for a moment. Then, with a blast of fetid air, opened.

All three recoiled from the odor.

"What the….?" Clem snorted. "Ah, man. That stupid fucker is dead in there."

"Wait," Ana already had a weapon pulled. Sarah beside her, also got her pistol out, and the two women led the way into the room.

The banks of video cameras still rolled their eagle's view of the inhabitants of the complex. Some were of empty rolling hallways, the miles and miles of paths under the complex. Others were more personal, opening onto the rooms occupied by civilians and soldiers alike. A mother giving a baby a bath. One of the Native American elders sitting motionless in his room. A husband and wife in a tense and angry showdown. One showed the group ready to enter the hangar bay; Rhodes, John, and McDermott watching the group that entered.

"Bennigan?" Sarah called out again.

A stiff putrid silence answered them.

The field of view was limited by the piles and piles of debris. They rounded a corner and recoiled at the sight of human excrement piled in a corner. It had fermented in the room and was part of the hideous odor that coiled around them.

"I'm going to need a shower." Ana mused, but her eyes never stopped their path around the room.

"He's been crazy for so long." Sarah answered. "I guess I didn't realize it had been so long since we'd seen him."

"Stupid fucker." Clem pouted. "Nobody else went off their rocker. Just the fucking chaplain. Lotta help, he was."

"Where is he?" Ana asked quietly. They were almost all the way around the room. "He's not in the complex, someone would have seen him."

Clem stopped a few feet behind them and picked up a set of communications from the desk. He frowned as he scanned them, reading not being his forte, and then read them again. "Um, Doc?"

Sarah glanced back at him before she cleared the last section of the room. "What is it, Clem?"

"This…" he brandished the paper at her. "Bennigan was intercepting transmissions. Who the fuck knew he could do that?"

"Intercepting?" Sarah strode to the paper and hooked it toward her. "Intercepting what?"

Clem answered with a scream. Skeletal hands clutched his calf as sucking teeth latched onto the soft flesh and bit deep. Bennigan had stopped eating long before he died and the zombie reflected the wasting of the chaplain's body into a ragged mummy of a man. The skin was stretched so tightly across the face that it cracked as it bit into Clem. Blood welled up around the bite and splashed across the dusty skin.

"Oh my god!" He screamed and cart-wheeled backwards. His flailing knocked over several piles and they clattered to the floor around Bennigan.

Sarah tried to swing up her gun but a pile struck her and she was forced to step backwards. Ana moved past her with a serious look and aimed. "I've got it."

Two shots and Bennigan's head added to the mess on the floor. There wasn't much blood, just a rapid crack like a rotten egg, and brain tissue discolored with syphilis lesions spilled out. Ana retched slightly at that, but immediately turned on Clem.

"No-no-no-no-no-no-no…." He begged.

**Crack. **Real blood and brains erupted out of his face. The close range shot back-splashed onto Ana and Sarah. The two woman stood mutely in the aftermath, their faces dusted with blood. Paper and the stench of the room all around them stood in testimony to madness.

"No more cameras." Sarah said softly. "No more intercepting communications that McDermott should be seeing. It ends here." Her boots tracked through the remains of both men as she hefted the first computer screen and sent it crashing to the floor.

-----------------------------

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph." McDermott took another swig of liquor as they watched the chaos inside of the hangar bay. "How the hell do they go out there like that?"

"No choice." Rhodes answered snidely. "If the good doctor needs bodies for experiments….we've gotta get them somewhere. Jayne!" He shouts suddenly. "Pick it up! We haven't got all day!"

The brunette flipped him the bird as she readjusted the huge board they were using to corral the zombies and herd them towards a tunneled opening. The bodies pressing against the boards made them unwieldly to move along the floor.

Early that morning DeWayne had opened the roof to let the walkers above them fall inside. Once the doors were closed again, they'd set up a trap and like Roman infantry used the herding boards to box the walkers in. Now they had to get them across the floor, over six hundred feet to the door.

"Ready….move!" Bellowed Kenneth.

Every soldier and Marine lifted the boards and shuffled forward five steps before setting them back down again.

"There are times when I'm glad my job is to fly the whirlybird." John said softly. "And nothing more."

"Yeah, well you'd better keep it sharp." Rhodes warned him. "You start causing problems like Cahill…"

John tensed and even McDermott chanced a glance at Rhodes.

"What do you mean like Cahill?" The sing-song accent deepened with concern. "What you talking about, Rhodes? Cahill fell."

Rhodes eyes flicked towards the ceiling as another call to move echoed across the hangar bay floor. "I just mean that he was a problem before the accident."

The two friends shared a look of concern.

Rhodes snorted. "Look, fucking Jesus forgot one. John, why don't you get out there and take care of it."

The zombie that Rhodes indicated had shattered its legs in the fall but was still trying to gamely crawl toward the soldiers. Mangled pieces of bone trailed out behind him as they were pulled off by the friction of movement.

"No, mon." John shook his head as he headed toward the exit. "That's not in my contract."

He left and McDermott quickly followed him out. "So?" The older man asked. "What do you think?"

There was a seriousness to his words that belied the levity of them. "Something is not right in Denmark, mon. I'm beginning to be thinking that Cahill didn't fall from the bird but as he was pushed."

McDermott soothed himself with another drink. "Shit."

"Shit, may be the least of our worries. Jaynie and Sarah, I trust. Even some of the new ones. But the rest of them…..crazy mon. Stone cold crazy."

-------------------------------

The last of the walkers made it through the door into the corral that they'd jerry-rigged from present structures and a rudimentary gate system. Now they could be enticed down a single unused hallway towards Logan's lab without endangering any of the other complex inhabitants. Jayne rested on her haunches as the door shut behind them. Sweat stained the front and back of her t-shirt and had gathered at the crevices of her elbows and knees. Tremors gripped her hands from holding so tightly to the boards and she smoothed them on her pant legs to stop the movement.

"How are you doing?"

His shadow passed over her as he stopped in the glow of the incandescent lights that lined the hangar bay. Behind him the choppers and jet were being uncovered. They'd discovered that falling zombies could do a lot of damage to the grounded birds unless they were protected. Several soldiers were actually doing their job for once and working at clean-up of the bay floor.

"Better than yesterday, no worse than tomorrow."

"Sounds like a bullshit answer to me." He shot back and made her smile.

"Bullshit is my specialty."

"Well saddle up then. Sarah just called on the radio. We've got some kind of meeting to go to."

"A meeting?" A light entered her eyes for the first time in weeks. "We only have those if something important has happened." She lunged to her feet and then weaved slightly as the blood rush hit her brain.

"You're back?" Kenneth asked with a smile.

"Afraid you can't keep up?" She teased back, but at the bottom of it all the sadness that dragged at her was shoved back into the darkness. There wasn't time for it. Not now. Not if something big was coming. Kenneth laughed as she sprinted for the door and then lunged past her in a race.

* * *

** Sorry about the delays. Had to finish another fanfic, and just started a second zombie screenplay on top of the first one that is 2/3 finished. Oh yeah, new job too. But...house is no longer flooded. Yay.**

**Give me one more chapter and then five chapters of carnage will ensue. Hope to keep everyone interested. If not Logan can always use another body. :) Seriously though, give me a shout if you have an opinion.  
**

**Chapter 19 preview: Bennigan forgot to mention more than one thing.**

**  
**


	20. Chapter 19

**And Semper Fi – Part III**

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* * *

**

"Who exactly do you think is running this monkey shit operation!" Rhodes snarled across the table at Sarah. Their argument had been going for the last thirty minutes with increasing moments of vulgarity and shouting.

"This is a civilian operation, Captain. Your men are here as operational support." The reply was as calm as Sarah was. The doctor leaned on the table, her shirtsleeves rolled up around pale forearms as she discussed the papers beneath her hands.

Around her sat Kenneth, Ana, Michael in his new role as leader of the BRCM, John, McDermott with ever present whiskey in hand, and Jayne and Hawkes. The group was heavily swayed in Sarah's favor but Rhodes still had more trained soldiers on his side. They sat at the far end of the cafeteria playing cards but with weapons close at hand.

Clem's death had earned them quite a bit of animosity.

"And there are survivors out there. We should make contact. Try to find out if they know anything about the plague." She took a breath. "Captain, this is our chance to see what's made it in the world."

"There are a lot of fucking zombies out there. We can't make it to Cleveland, or Pittsburgh for that matter, in the choppers."

Jayne coughed lightly to get their attention. "DeWayne has the fuel to make a flyby. Bird seats two. We could at least get a glimpse."

The idea didn't sit well with Sarah. "Visuals aren't the solution. We need to get someone out to talk to them face-to-face."

"I don't think you're understanding me, lady." His voice got slower as though he was talking to an infant. "We're not going. Not a single one of my men. Not on your pretty little suicide mission."

"I can go." Jayne's comment got her a look of pure evil from Rhodes but she didn't back down. "DeWayne and I will do an assessment. We can scout out potential refuel locations on our way. And we send one chopper, no more. That way, if something happens, you still have one left."

His lips curled in an angry smear. "Got this all worked out, don't you?"

Her shrug enrages him even more and one hand inches toward his firearm. Kenneth sees the movement and kicks Jayne underneath the table. The gaze that passes between them needs no words. Things are escalating downhill faster and faster now. Meeting and assessing other survivors might not be a matter of outreach, but a necessity for continued survival.

"I think that's a fabulous idea." Sarah said. "How long til you can get in the air?"

"Tomorrow."

"I…"

"It's settled." Michael cut in. "A flyby won't hurt anything."

The group broke up and sorted itself out through the various doors. The soldiers kept at their card game and Rhodes kept his own counsel as he sat drinking tequila.

Five minutes after everyone had left, Logan bustled through the door looking distracted. The soldiers ceased their game to look at him as he moved toward Rhodes.

"Captain, I thought there was a meeting called."

"It started an hour ago, Frankenstein. And finished long before you came up for air." The words were only slightly slurred. "Go back to your lab and do whatever the hell it is you do down there."

"Research," Logan assured him. "Extremely promising research."

But Rhodes wasn't paying attention to him anymore.

-----------------

_Twelve hours later._

DeWayne and Jayne, and both of them humorously mocking their own names, had already walked the length of the hangar bay and into the long branching corridor that shot toward the sky. The jet moved so fast that the doors on the end opened long enough for it to shoot skyward and closed again before the zombies could focus on the aperature. They'd done their walk to check for any loose debris.

Anything that could possibly get sucked into the engine was a threat to them. And since DeWayne no longer had a crew that serviced his bird, he had to do all of the maintenance himself with the other pilots as back-ups. It made the most minor problem into mountains.

Their small party was complete when John and Kenneth joined them. The two black men were surprisingly different, especially after Kenneth had called the Caribbean an African-American. It was always odd to hear such a mellifluous voice curse with such vigor.

They stopped by the jet as DeWayne gave Jayne's flight suit a last check. He ran through it with the experience of 20 years service, but there was something tired about his eyes. Something that echoed all of their eyes since Cahill had died and the Big Rock had become a much more frightening place to live.

"You be careful, Jaynie-girl." John cautioned. "We'll help Michael out as much as we can here, but with Sarah and Logan wrapped up in their experiments…."

"I know." She tried to smile but it was harder than she imagined possible. And not in the least because she hadn't been up in a jet since they'd first found DeWayne. "But we'll only be gone half a day."

"No fuel beyond that." DeWayne added seriously.

"Be careful anyway." John cautioned. "We need every sane voice here."

DeWayne climbed into the cockpit as Jayne hugged John and the lanky Caribbean headed back towards the safety of the complex tunnels. For a long moment she regarded Kenneth, a faint smile teasing her lips as she waited for him to say something.

"No words of wisdom?" She prompted him finally.

"I don't want to have to say anything nice at your memorial." He said sourly.

"Then say something mean."

But their banter masked deeper emotions. Then, before he could war with himself any longer, he swept forward and engulfed her tightly. Her arms wrapped around him and she squeezed back. Then just as quickly they separated and she climbed into the RIO station of the jet cockpit. Her helmet was almost on when she paused and shouted after him.

"Semper fi, goddamit! You were supposed to say semper fi!"

-----------------------

Again the 'sane' ones from the Big Rock were clustered together, listening to the signal that DeWayne and Jayne were sending out as they passed the surviving city of Cleveland and headed further east.

"_It's pretty rough."_ Jayne's voice came through to them. "_Real rough traveling for anybody on foot or by car. The rots are thick in some places."_

"What are they doing?" McDermott asked between swallows of whiskey.

"_It's almost like they're waiting."_ A pause. "_Jesus Christ, how long are they going to walk around? Man, you couldn't even get into a mall these days." _Jayne chuckles. "_Tell Michael and Ana they're stuck with us."_

A crackle of static cuts across the radio.

"What was that? Come back?"

_"Warning light."_

"Warning light?" Kenneth echoed ominously. "I thought you checked that bird."

John is watching the equipment with wide eyes as though he could see through the wireless to what was happening all those miles away. With steady hands he picked up the mike. "Jayne. DeWayne. What is your location?"

"_Fire on the portside wing! Jesus! Losing altitude--- Jayne, what's...?"_

_"…ayne, can't engage aux… Fuck! Fire in secondary structures--- and rising."_

_"Losing power…god--- hydraulics!"_

"Where are you!" John thundered.

There was nothing but static and silence.

Long beats passed where hands were clutched together and the beginnings of prayers started.

"…_Struthers…We're going down outside--- Struthers. Oh my……"_

Static reigned supreme. They'd lost them.


	21. Chapter 20

**Alive**

The sky was blue.

Jayne smiled as she stared up into it. Bluer than she'd ever remembered seeing it. An unreal shade of vibrance without any clouds to mar the perfection of an endless horizon.

She blinked as something hazy crossed her vision. Sticky and heavy it dripped down her forehead, blazing a path despite her attempts to dislodge it. Now, as it entered her eyebrows she desperately tried to raise one hand to wipe it clean, but her hands were trapped where she could neither see nor feel them.

"What's going on?"

There was a tremor in her voice that she didn't recognize. And the taste of blood entered her mouth.

"CJ?" She called the name as though someone would answer, but she couldn't remember why it was important. The urgency of that question faded as she closed her eyes and descended back into unconsciousness.

--------------------------

"Jayne!"

Her head snapped up, one eye completely obscured by caked and congealed blood. Jayne Canton looked up into the blue sky as a shadow descended over her. DeWayne had lost a section of scalp and was covered in blood, some not obviously his own as he held a section of metal rebar loosely in one hand. His flight suit looked like he had run a few miles to get to her from the sweat stains that gathered underneath his armpits.

"Why the hell are you lying around?"

For the first time she realized that she was still in the ejection seat. The parachute had wrapped around it as they'd tumbled on the ground and finally come to rest in the middle of an open field. The helmet on her head had come off at some point, although Jayne couldn't have said when she'd lost it.

He sliced through the tough lines and helped her up.

"I feel like shit, Dee." The statement was shaky, mimicking the strength of her legs as she leaned on him.

"No time." He pressed another section of rebar into her hands. "Can you fight?"

"Wh---?" She started. And then she saw _them_.

Fingers tightened around the metal and she straightened. "I can fight."

"Good, cause otherwise, being alive won't be an option."

The two turned to watch the oncoming horde. Tens, tens of tens, maybe hundreds of zombies. All bearing down on them.


	22. Chapter 21

**The Lull Before the Storm**

Adrenaline raced through exhausted limbs and both DeWayne and Jayne straightened. The slender black pilot cracked his spine as he raised one hand towards the far end of the street. It trembled as it pointed but it was clear enough for Jayne to follow the direction to the obvious conclusion.

"The semi?"

"It'll have the horsepower we need."

She tried to rub the blood out of her eye but it was smeared so deep that she still couldn't open the lids. "Do you know how to hotwire it?"

He chuckled softly. "I read an article on the Internet. If we're alive when we get there we'll find out how good my memory is."

The first of the zombies was almost to them. A partially decapitated, middle-aged man who still wore the remnants of a Hooters t-shirt. Jayne frowned at the large nipples that showed through the O's.

"Some people." She muttered. The rebar wasn't even close to the kind of weapon she wanted to face this crowd. It slid through her fingers in some places and was held in sticky embrace in others. There would be no fluidity to this battle, just a hack and slash operation.

"Are you ready?"

"No."

DeWayne shifted the rebar in his hands and embraced her shoulders quickly. "You know, I never dug white girls. But if this is the last day I'm alive…"

"It's not." She shot back and swung the metal shaft two-handed back onto her right shoulder. "What the fuck is wrong with white girls?"

He shrugged but his eyes flashed towards her ass and Jayne gave a choked laugh.

DeWayne took the first strike. The small elderly woman who reminded both of them of their third grade teachers, although it never would have come up, crumpled with the single eye strike. Vitreous fluid oozed out around the steel before she dropped, and almost as quickly he stabbed at another walker.

Jayne went for Hooters-man. She frowned again at the nipples as she swung for his head. The man bobbed away from the strike, fast for a zombie, and came at her as she readied for another one. Fingers touched her elbow and she smashed out with the bone. The zombie was close enough that she clipped him and he staggered back. Her momentum didn't slow as she thrust the rebar straight up through the point of his chin and through the skull.

Bone popped free of flesh like she'd broken an eggshell from the inside and he toppled over.

"We'll never make it if we fight!" DeWayne yelled to her. "RUN!"

More zombies were pouring in from every direction. Hordes that they would never be able to fight or outrun if either of them had stopped to be logical. The masses of undead also blocked them from the semi at the end of the street and more were coming.

"Where?" Jayne blurted. Her head swung from side to side as she tried to see the street.

The city around them had fallen quietly. Unlike Minneapolis and St. Paul. Unlike Washington D.C., which they'd both seen during the evacuation, where what looting had not destroyed, the fires and the dead had. Gas explosions were so common that they'd quit looking at the reports after awhile. Man's technology could not survive without him.

Struthers hadn't emerged entirely from the fifties, there were still relics all around them of an earlier era. But the future had come in and the older buildings sat side by side with the McDonalds and Burger Kings of progress. Most of them were still intact and not hollowed yet by time and weather's inexorable hands.

But something caught her attention. A building that looked relatively unmarked.

"There!" She whispered as DeWayne beat off another walker. They started toward the goal as the street flooded with the dead. The strange hollow moans started as the zombies honed in on the food.

"We'll be trapped." They were cut off in all directions and he could see that as well as she.

"It'll buy us some time."

The front door was open, either luck or an act of God, and they fell inside in a tangle of limbs. DeWayne immediately jumped up and dragged the heavy riot control doors into place. They'd been set there at the start of the outbreak, protection for the police officers who'd died before they'd realized what the threat was.

"Somebody's watching out for us." DeWayne giggled hysterically as he slumped against the doors of the police station, the heavy crossbar still at his feet. "My momma always told me to go to church for two reasons. One was that someday God would honor the faithful, and two, cause we never had a president who didn't go to church. You know I've been going to church 33 years. Since the week I was born and I never really believed in him. Especially not since most of the faithful are dead, including my momma. But today. Fuck me. Today I believe."

The comment about god passed Jayne by as she squatted on the floor and almost fell. She looked up at him, as well as she could with one good eye. "You wanted to be President?"

---------------------

Ana and Sarah entered the last hallway slowly. Even this far from Logan's lab it had a strange smell to it. Not old blood, although Sarah knew there must be plenty of it, and not the sharp acridity of formalin. A smell that stank of half-completed putrefication and fermented rot bottled up in too small a space. Even the huge air system couldn't wipe out that level of odor.

The two women shared a nervous glance before continuing on. "How long has it been since anyone has been down here?" Ana asked softly, as though the words might wake something around them.

"Not since Jayne... about two weeks ago."

The response brought a choked silence to both of them. It had only been a few hours since the jet went down. Above them, McDermott and Kenneth were still frantically trying to contact either of the two with no success. No one wanted to give up hope, but there was a hollow sense of defeat about the entire complex. Even if Jayne and DeWayne had survived, they were alone and on foot hundreds of miles from safety. The world was too bitter these days for them to pretend a happy ending.

"Dr. Logan?" Sarah said into the dank air. They were in an unfinished portion of the complex. The walls were unpainted and the open concrete facing seemed to soak up sound as well as the heavy omnipresent feeling that something bad was going on.

"What is he researching?" Ana asked as she pushed open a door to their left and recoiled from the bodies stacked like cordwood inside. Cold air misted out around them as she shut the door quickly.

"Ways to control their behavior."

"But not a cure?"

Sarah shook her head, the loose French braid threatening to come loose from the movement. "I'm the molecular virologist. Logan is a psychiatric neurologist. He believes that all behavior can be controlled through chemical or physical manipulation of the brain."

"Drugs are the answer." Ana spoke under her breath as she opened another door. One hand remained perpetually at the holster she wore cross-wise. Clem's attack in the basement and the subsequent battle with Bennigan had made the former nurse wary of the slightest change in the environment around her. The soldiers in the complex would have called it situational awareness if any of them had possessed it in half the amount that Ana did.

"Dr. Logan?" Sarah called again.

"Girls." Logan bustled out of a door further down the hall. "Fabulous! You're just in time to see my latest progress."

His surgical gown had seen better days, perhaps several months earlier. It was streaked with smears so old it was hard to tell that they were even blood stains. There were other marks on it, some that looked like the green-black discard of bile and others that looked like they'd been grey once. Logan was impervious to his state of disarray.

Ana looked closer at him, ready to tell him to change his gloves. They were so engrained with blood and gore that it was hard to tell how many zombies he used them on. The contents of her stomach heaved slightly as she realized he wasn't wearing gloves.

"Dr. Logan, we've come to tell you that we lost Jayne and DeWayne."

He glanced at them with a slightly mystified look. "Who?"

"Sergeant Canton and Captain Johnson."

His wrinkled brow assured them that he still had no idea of who they were talking about. But before Sarah could elucidate further a shadow crossed the window behind Logan. The shadow the height of a man.

Both women drew immediately.

"What is that?" Ana demanded. "Who's inside?"

"My greatest progress," Logan gushed enthusiastically. "It's Bub."

-------------

The knock at the door came hollowly and Rhodes head came up slowly. The culmination of three hours of drinking had already left dark rings under the soft flesh of his eyes. He looked like shit, even for a military man who had lost all semblance of professionalism.

"Come."

Michael pushed through the open door and Rhodes visibly grimaced. "What do you want?"

"I…" The words trailed off as Michael's eyes caught on a series of small objects on the table in front of Rhodes and his voice changed to incredulous disbelief. "You sabotaged the jet."

It took Rhodes a moment for his eyes to focus on the items and another minute to remember what they were. Each one was a tiny triangular sliver of wire. On some the outer coating of protective rubber was the outer edge of the triangle, and on others there was nothing but wire. Not enough to disrupt the flow of current immediately, but enough to cause catastrophic failure once the chain reaction started inside the plane.

Rhodes fumbled for his gun even as Michael reached for his own. But there wasn't enough time – so he lunged over the top of the table. The glass whiskey bottle shattered on the floor. The chips of wire flew in every direction as Rhodes tackled Michael.

The two men grappled for control. Rhodes was slowed by alcohol-induced haze, and every movement was twice as hard, but Michael had the disadvantage of combat naivete. His survival had been as much luck as any real skill. Rhodes had killed one hundred times the number of zombies and seven more men than Michael had.

He grunted as he got one hand around the front of Michael's face. Teeth grazed his skin as he smashed backwards. The first thump echoed and a wave of pain blanketed the man below him long enough for Rhodes to draw back again. The second blow cracked skull and splattered blood all across the floor. Michael's struggles became frantic but senseless as he flopped underneath the Captain. Rhodes pulled him up again and thrust all his weight on the final blow. Concrete and gravity smashed Michael's head, making a round object flat as brains and blood erupted from the weakened cavity.

The sudden exhaustion of the day overwhelmed Rhodes and he leaned back away from his handiwork.

Blood spread out slowly, mixing first with whiskey and glass, before pooling out further. The dark red fluid was thick enough that it lifted the small pieces of wire off the floor and floated them along. Swirling, vicious reminders of what Rhodes had done.


	23. Chapter 22

**When It Rains – Part I**

Jayne lifted the crossbar even as the sound of hands began to bat at the door as the zombies gathered outside the police station. The muted thumping could have been thunder if they hadn't known what was on the other side. Although their energy was nearly depleted, there was still much to be done, plans to be formulated, emergency calls to send out if they could find a working radio.

"Listen." DeWayne said suddenly.

There was a noise from behind them. Something in the station rustled and then crashed into the floor from movement inside.

"We have to secure the building."

He nodded and scooped the rebar back up from the floor. It trembled in his hands as though it might fall and Jayne's grip wasn't much more secure. They waited a second to strengthen their dedication and then started into the building. Everything counted now, there wasn't any time to give into the weakness that gripped them, not if they were going to survive.

The station didn't look like it had seen much violence, just the ancillary kind as officers had rushed off to save the world. Papers were still scattered across desks and phones lay off the hook, none made any noise as the connections had been severed long before.

Jayne crouched as she moved down the left hand corridor and spun around the edge of the wall. No walkers in sight. The corridor led to the six holding cells that had been more than enough for the small town. She checked each one. Four held bodies, each one showing the signs of failed escape when the occupants had been forgotten. The last one held another body that was a little bit different. Time had rotted the remnants of blood and brains down to dry smudges of organic residue. The policeman they'd belonged to still clutched the .44 Magnum he'd used to end everything.

"I had to find the Dirty Harry fan," she griped as she dislodged the revolver and searched his pockets for reload.

Another sound caught her ears and she whirled.

The box of rounds went into one of the pockets of the flight suit she wore. The corridor ended after the holding cells, it looked like she'd gotten the smaller area to search. Trying not to hurry, but still hurrying, she headed back toward DeWayne. Gun clutched in one hand, rebar in the other since she wasn't ready to discard it yet.

"DeWayne?" She whispered. "Where the fuck are you?"

A **_CRASH_**... And he screamed.

Jayne burst through the set of doors that separated the two rooms. Images flashed across her mind too fast to think about them. Four stenches had DeWayne in their grasp as he wielded the steel like a baseball bat, desperately swinging away their advances. Amorous lovers didn't have anything on the clutching embrace of the dead.

She raised the Magnum and nearly lost her hand as the recoil blew her tired arm backward. The shot missed and DeWayne screamed again as one latched onto the skin of his face. The barely connected skin was right between the dead man's lips and the zombie ripped it backwards and tore it away from his face. Blood poured out of the fresh wound.

The Magnum fired again and again. Then Jayne abandoned it as a firearm and bludgeoned the dead cop who'd turned toward her. She smashed downward and ripped off his nose with the first blow. It didn't slow it down. The second blow came down on the crown and the man gave her a confused expression like he'd just realized that he was dead before he tumbled to the pavement.

She spun back. Her last two shots had taken out two and the third was the cop she'd just beat down but the fourth was on top of DeWayne who was blinded by his own blood. This one had a feral streak and it bared teeth as she dragged it off of DeWayne.

It clamped on her arm and tried to bite down. Jayne put the rebar between its teeth but didn't have the power to shove it backwards. She was so fucking tired that there was nothing left to fight with. The zombie broke teeth as it bit onto the rebar and tried to bear her backwards with its weight.

"Jayne…" The voice was barely a whisper, but it was enough to catch the zombie's attention. Its head whipped around so fast that Jayne's neck throbbed in sympathy from the sharp movement. The rebar ripped sideways out of its teeth and slashed the entire cheek open, nothing but dark ocher dripped out.

The last blow was all that she had. It smashed through the zombie's back and she followed the movement downward, the only place she had energy left to go. The former cop was impaled on the rebar and it writhed weakly still trying to reach them.

Jayne stepped close enough to place the muzzle of the gun against the cop's head. "I know what you're thinking." She said with an angry sneer. "Did she fire six shots or only five?"

The Magnum bucked and the cop twitched once as his head was pulverized. The recoil splashed Jayne with gore that was immediately lost against the pattern of her own blood and injuries.

"The question you've got to ask yourself is: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" DeWayne coughed from the ground, sightless and badly injured but still alive for the moment. "God, I fucking loved that movie."

She crouched next to him. There was nothing that could be done. They'd bitten him at least six times and the blood loss was bad enough that Jayne didn't even bother to apply pressure. He'd die just a little bit faster from the bites than from the injuries but it was going to be a close race. Already air whistled in his lungs as he fought to breathe.

"I'm sorry." The words were a struggle as he forced them out.

"We should have stayed together." But deep inside Jayne knew that this was the fate waiting for all of them. If Sarah didn't discover a cure, this was the only end they could ever hope for. The sudden depression of that though was overwhelming and she sank to her knees next to him.

"I hope…" a gasping breath. "That it was five. That…you've got another bullet."

She nodded even though he couldn't see it. "I have enough. DeWayne, I just want you to know…"

"It's been good knowing…" He couldn't finish the sentence.

Tears gathered in her eyes as she raised the gun toward him, grateful that at least he would never see it coming.

"If none of this had happened." Jayne told him with all seriousness. "I would have voted for you. Even if you didn't like my ass." A brief smile touched his lips before the bullet smashed into him.

The station filled with the sounds of agony as Jayne crawled away from the corpses that littered the floor. She collapsed ten feet away and pressed her face against the ground. In everything that had happened she had never faced this. Surrounded by a thousand zombies, and she was all alone. Although she hadn't loved him, DeWayne had been a good friend and one that would be sorely missed.

She didn't have much time though. The thumping took on a new tone, the screeching of hinges protesting against the weight pressed against them. The station has riot doors at the front but nothing at the back. Not in their wildest dreams had the men at Struthers PD ever expected the multitude of dead that would be outside wanting to get in.

Jayne's head snapped up and in a tired lunge she was up off the ground. She scavenged the dead bodies for additional ammo and found a set of keys in one pocket. Although they were slimy with decay and some rank juice from the dead zombie she spun them through her fingers. Each key was smartly labeled with plastic strips, waterproof, and still readable despite the fluid. They slipped through her fingers. The holding cells, the front door, the back door, armory keys, the evidence locker and the real gold mine – the roof.

She rushed through the station to find the few bits and pieces of a former life, shoving them up the rickety ladder. Some fortunate bit of the old city had meant that there was no staircase for roof access. It was a traditional attic ladder that led to a small breach doorway that opened onto the roof.

Muscles protested as she dragged water cooler bottles and shoved them skyward. Her body was so bone tired that she dropped the medical kit three times before it went through the ceiling and her adrenaline failed her towards the end. She still needed to hit the armory and the evidence locker when the back door fell with a clanging ricochet and the zombies poured through.

She scrambled up the stairs and almost lost the bulky radio in her arms. Two of the front runners were the faster, more versatile dead and they clamped onto the bottom of the stairs as she tried to pull it up after her.

One bared a mouth gone hideous and black with rot. Several of the teeth were broken and each eyeball had shriveled in the socket so that they moved with tight, tense motions. It chomped downward and another tooth snapped from the motion. It was trying to climb when Jayne pressed the Magnum against its forehead and pulled the trigger. Her aim was off more than she wanted to admit, aiming with one eye gummed shut impaired her shooting. This time the recoil pushed her arm back so hard that the tendons screamed out in protest and there wasn't anything to do except prop the radio against her toes as she took aim with both hands.

The second zombie eyed the remnants of its companion and for a moment, thought better of the attack.

Jayne lunged upward and let the hanging door swing shut behind her. It only took a second and she was safe. With hands that shook she severed the attic string and the only possible way the zombies might follow her skyward.

Gasping for breath, she assessed her situation. The radio was safe, and enough water to last a few days along with a supply of Power Bars from a desk sergeant and the corresponding bottle of whiskey that had been hiding beneath them. She managed to find a pair of sweaty workout clothes but they were cleaner than the blood-caked flight suit she wore. And the medical kit which looked to be well-stocked. It was everything the refugee running from zombies needed to last until rescue.

As long as rescue came.

Jayne lifted the radio and dialed to one of the frequencies that McDermott regularly checked. It took her a moment to start speaking, if no one heard her, if no one came, she was all alone.

"Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Sergeant Jayne Canton calling anyone who receives this transmission. Our plane went down In Struthers. I am a survivor. I am not bitten. I repeat. I am not bitten." She took a deep breath and looked skyward. The blue sky was gone, filled now with dark storm clouds.

It took her a second to extrapolate what time it might be. Almost evening. And they'd crashed in the mid-morning. More than enough time for the storm to gather.

"Fuck," she cursed off-air. And then, into the radio again. "Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Sergeant Jayne Canton. I am alive. I am not bitten. If you're drunk and miss this transmission, I hope to god that your cirrhosis kicks in ten years early. Do you hear me, McDermott? You fucking Irish bastard, I'm alive."

White noise was all she heard. She dialed up the frequency and back down, repeating her message over and over until she was hoarse. Fat wet water droplets cascaded around her and the radio and as she hissed her plea one last time, water entered the casing and caused something to short inside. The radio gave a hiccupping burp and caught fire.

It only took a few seconds for the thickening rainfall to blanket the piece of equipment and put out the flames.

Jayne sat in the water and turned her face upward. She didn't have anywhere else to go.

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**Thanks to everybody reading and letting me know what works and doesn't work.** **And again I apologize to all DOTD04 fans who have cringed everytime I kill off one of those characters.**

**The chaos in the complex is just beginning and I can now say with certainly that Fiddler's Green will be soon. I also apologize for the liberties taken with Struthers layout, I have never been there, but it looks like a nice dot on the map. :)  
**

**Preview next chapter: How tame is Bub? What does Logan know about the beginning of the outbreak? And will Rhodes give himself away?**

**  
**


	24. Chapter 23

**It Pours – Part II**

"Who the hell is Bub?" Ana asked tensely.

"Come inside and meet him." Logan said, oblivious to their concern. He was giddy as he went to the door and gestured for them to follow him. "He's perfectly harmless, I assure you."

Sarah and Ana shared a long look. Neither of them believed him, but neither of them had seen as much as Jayne. Without bothering to holster their weapons they followed him into the room slowly.

It was immediately obvious that Logan only cleaned to keep the bodies from piling up, aseptic technique was something he'd never practiced. Even the machinery had the half-forgotten look of the unused. Whatever research he'd done was crippled by insanity.

"Bub." Logan said to the zombie within the room and the man, the former man, turned to look at the two women slowly. There were no chains on him, nothing restraining him, and both women dropped their fingers from the trigger guard to the trigger.

"I told you. He's harmless." Logan pattered about. "Named him after my father, a great surgeon. Can you imagine a surgeon named Bub?"

"What is he?" Sarah asked, her voice strangely flat and cold.

"My most promising subject. I've been unable to surgically limit their hunger so I was exploring positive reinforcement." Logan reached into a deep bucket on the floor. "Come here, Bub."

The man shuffled toward him, his jaw stretching and gaping towards the food reward in Logan's hand. But when he reached it, he hesitated and sniffed at it tentatively as well as the hand holding it.

"He likes fresher meat," Logan offered by way of explanation. "But the Captain was most adamant that I couldn't have the body he was hauling out."

"Body?" A sharper, more nervous sound entered Sarah's voice.

"Yes." Logan's distraction was never more evident than at that moment. "The body of that fellow. You know, the one who took over for Cahill."

Ana's face dropped. Gone was the tough exterior that the nurse had cultivated since her attack. Her gun hand wavered and a look of hurt washed over her face. "You're lying."

"I never lie, my dear. Why they dragged him out not…"

Ana ran.

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She burst out of the complex tunnel and into the fenced yard like a fury. The bright glare of the sun bit at her eyes and burned straight down to the lump in her throat. She spun, frantically searching.

Normally there were anywhere from ten to one hundred zombies on their perimeter. Today there were none. Every single rot had been gunned down and left to rot in the spring sun. The bodies were a sinister piece of evidence that someone had left the safety of the compound.

There wasn't any time to wait for the others. Not when she had to know the truth. Not when she wanted Logan to be wrong.

She pushed open the gate and ran into the open. There was no direct sign but all she had to do was follow the bodies.

Birds chirped in counterpoint to her thudding heartbeat as she ran. And then, an opening appeared, just a small break in the trees. Ana froze, her muscles refusing to respond to the urgent plea in her mind that she needed to flee. _Luis._ Her mind whispered to her in savage recall. _First Luis and now Michael._

She heard a whimper come from her mouth as she stepped backwards, and then forwards as she couldn't draw away. The shoulders looked liked his, like when he was laying in bed reading by candlelight. From the angle of the shirt, to the way his hair, where blood hadn't matted it, fell forward over one collar. She'd been meaning to trim his hair but kept forgetting. And now it was unnecessary.

_It's not fair._

"Michael?"

But of course he didn't answer. Nursing school wasn't needed to catalogue the damage that had been done to him. He was dead. Brutally but efficiently. He wasn't going to get back up. _Not like Luis when she'd missed the artery. Slipping through her fingers. Her mistake. Her fault. When it slipped right through her fingers._

"Michael?" She whispered again.

"Ana?" Shouted a voice through the trees. Female, so it was probably Sarah.

She didn't answer, didn't move. Everything stayed frozen.

Whatever had kept her going that first day of the outbreak. Whatever it was that had kept her alive every day after that. Whatever that spark had been, was gone. She just didn't have anything left to fight for.

"Michael…" The ground was soft and loamy under her knees. If she'd had the energy to look she would have seen the harsh boot prints in the ground. Military bootprints that led to only one conclusion. Except that the conclusion didn't matter to her, just the scene right in front of her. Michael was dead. _I'm a nurse. I can help you. Just not this time._

"Ana!" The searchers shouted again.

Tears burst forth, great heaping sobs that she couldn't hold back any longer. Luis was dead. Michael was dead. And she was so tired. _Life – slipping right through her fingers._

_Life…_ In the woods, a zombie growled at the scent of fresh blood.

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Kenneth sat alone in the cafeteria, his broad hands spinning the cold cup of coffee around and around. He hadn't drank any in almost an hour but it remained between his fingers. A cold silent comfort not nearly as useful as a shotgun. That part of him was on the floor, abandoned and forgotten. What good did a shotgun do when the person who needed rescuing couldn't be rescued?

"Goddamnit." He said to himself.

The feelings that were assaulting him weren't ones that he liked. Michael had turned him back once before, when going after his brother would be a suicide run. That guilt still lingered because there might have been a chance. Teddy wasn't a moron, he would have holed up somewhere. Might even have survived a day or two, until the food ran out or the doors were broken in.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" McDermott shouted as he slid through the doors. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Where the fuck have you been?"

"Go away." Came the quiet answer. The cold coffee tasted like bitter copper water going down his throat.

"Well, you're going to want to hear this first." The ever-present whiskey bottle touched McDermott's lips and the adam's apple bulged as he swallowed. "I wasn't even sure I heard it at first. You know, I'd had a few swigs, and then… well come on."

It took Kenneth a minute to realize the implications of the words. "She's alive."

"And as pissed as a wasp in a bee's nest." John stepped in behind McDermott but he was grinning ear to ear. "She be calling McDermott all sort of names but the girl be alive and not bitten."

McDermott quailed at the glare Kenneth sent his way. "I was scanning all frequencies. Just like I always do."

He interrupted. "So she knows we're coming for her."

"I was in the loo."

The pronouncement hit Kenneth hard and he slugged another shot of cold coffee as though it would turn into whiskey in his mouth. There was no doubt in his mind what they had to do. There wasn't any other option. They were going to get her.

But he listened as McDermott finished. "I caught her signal in playback. She'd quit broadcasting by the time I got on that channel. I've been trying to raise her every ten minutes. But nothing so far."

The coffee tipped as he thrust it away from him and stood. The shotgun already up and across his shoulder in preparation. Kenneth turned to John and the two men shared an unspoken agreement, they were going to get her. "If we strip the chopper to nothing but fuel, how far can we get?"

"Mon, I'd strip her to nothing but rotors and seats if we could. But Rhodes isna going to like us leaving. We should talk to Sarah first."

"Fuck, Sarah and fuck Rhodes." Came the snarl. "Ask me if I care. I'm going to get Jayne. And no wanna-be Kaiser from the motherfucking pansy-ass army is going to stop me."

"Are you so sure about that?"

Every soldier in the complex was backing up Rhodes as he entered the room. The dark-haired man frowned at the three as he crossed his arms tightly over his chest. "Cause the way I see it, she's not such a big loss. Saves me the trouble of killing her myself."

"You did kill Cahill." John whispered in understanding. "You pushed him out of the whirly-bird yourself."

Rhodes snorted and gestured to the men behind him. "Put all of them in the brig. Every fucking one of them. Clean out the goddamn hospital as well."

"What about the ones on the surface?" One of his men asked.

"Close the fucking airlock on them. Get moving!" He shouted when not one moved. Kenneth had his shotgun in a grip that let them know it wasn't going without a fight.

"But Jayne…" McDermott looked like he was going to drop his flask. "She's alive."

The comment made the Captain grin. "Not for long."


	25. Chapter 24

**UPDATE: **Sorry about the major delay. This chapter is a complete rewrite and wouldn't ever have gotten started if I hadn't just seen the best addition to the zombie pantheon _EVER! _Grindhouse was an awesome experience. And reminded me of why TS has always been one of my favorite guest actors in zombie flicks. So on to the story.

Let me know... good, bad, indifferent. :)**  
**

**The Flood – Part III**

"Ana!!" Sarah lunged onto the hunched blond woman and yanked her up so hard that the sobs were torn right out of her throat. "Oh fuck me." Michael's body lay sprawled in front of them but she didn't miss the evidence that lay around him. The analytical part of mind spat out the word 'incriminating', but her hind brain was already screaming 'danger'. These words were still too full of zombies to make any movements safe.

Ana moaned. A sound without hope.

But there wasn't even enough time for that. Sarah nodded to the three guards who'd followed her out. "Let's get moving."

"Do you want to bring his body back with us?"

The answer should have been yes. He wouldn't come back. The hole in his skull, the cracked pieces of bones, brains and blood cemented that. But there was no place they could bury him inside and although Sarah would never have told them, there was no use anymore. A body was just the leftovers. Michael, whatever had made him human, was long gone. True death or a bite. They all led to the same thing, Michael wouldn't ever come back, a fact that Ana understood all too well.

"No." Sarah slung Ana's arm over her shoulder and noticed, almost in surprise, that it was a beautiful day. "No time."

They ran for the entrance. Zombies began to come through the trees, mostly lurchers, many who'd traveled miles from their city of origin in search of blood. Like the people they came from, some were meant to be wanderers.

Two of the guards set up a perimeter as Sarah led Ana back through the gates towards the entrance. But she released the shell-shocked woman as she saw that the box cover was closed. She couldn't remember, not in the heat of the moment, whether they'd closed it behind them. It locked from the interior, a protection, and as she laid one hand against the warm metal, a sentence.

She yanked against it with a grunt of panic.

"What's wrong?" The guard, Tim, asked next to her. "Let's get inside. _They're coming_."

"It's locked."

"What do you mean it's locked? Why is it fucking locked?!!!" Tim leapt onto the cover and bashed at it with his rifle. "Let us back in!!!"

Ana answered him, her face drawn with grief and anger. "They left us out here to die."

* * *

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Kenneth lunged at Rhodes from the entrance of the brig. He was nearly twice as big as the Captain and he fully intended to put that weight into throttling the punk. Two inches into the movement, McDermott and John grabbed a hold of him and pinned him back. Weapons snapped up onto the movement and he snarled in rage.

"She's alive!" He roared. "She's alive."

Rhodes flipped the pistol in his hand and backhanded Kenneth casually. Except a casual backhand with a pistol ripped the skin off his nose and snapped his head backwards. Blood rushed down over the big cops face as he slumped slightly into the arms of the men that held him.

"You won't get away with this." John said softly. "What are you going to do with all of the people here?"

"As of right now, the hospital has been locked down. No one in or out."

"No supplies in either." A soldier cackled behind him. "Which leaves more for us."

"I'm going to kill you." Kenneth spat through the blood but Rhodes grinned happily in reply.

"You fucking try."

There was nothing else to do. Another step backwards and the doors slammed shut in front of them. Prison.

* * *

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Jayne wasn't thinking it was a pretty day. She was well and thoroughly pissed off. Her bruises had solidified into a sheet of green, purple, and a nasty shade of indigo that were spread across her body like a living tapestry. The roof had turned out to be a horrible place to survive. Hot during the day, cold at night, and it had rained three times, soaking her every time. The last one had left her with an aching cough that crept up from the pit of her lungs and bit into her chest with every breath.

The dead around the police station had continued to build up, day by day. It was like she had her own private fan base, and every one of them wanted a taste of her.

So it was with half an eye towards the fact that she'd been drinking whiskey without any food that she discounted the first rumble of an engine. But it drew closer and finally she capped the bottle with a frown.

The world exploded.

It threw her backwards and she skidded across the gravel topped roof with a scream of pain. One burst of flame and fire after another and she realized that someone was dropping missiles onto the street in front of her temporary residence. She'd landed spread-eagle and quickly curled up as debris, body parts, and something that smelled awfully like a colon landed around her.

When the fuselage stopped she peeked out of the shield of her arms and staggered to her feet. The street in front of the station was gone, completely annihilated along with the crowd of zombies that had once stood there. She cursed softly under her breath and let the slim ray of hope start to blossom. Kenneth and the others had come for her.

"Hey!" A shout echoed up to her and rode forward on the full throttle of motorcycles as a phalanx of bikes rounded the corner of Main Street and gunned their way toward her. Everything from a few sizable hogs to crotch rockets with two people perched on their narrow frames. Behind them lumbered a behemoth that might have been a tractor trailer in a previous life – before it had discovered steroids.

"Hey!" The rider who had shouted it, shouted again and Jayne stepped forward to the edge of the roof. "_Usted parece mierda._" He said with a grimace as he caught sight of her. "What did the _gato_ do to you?"

"The cat?" Jayne was confused, as confused as what her eyes were telling her through the fog of liquor and exhaustion. "What are you talking about, Cahill?"

The man looking up at her was the mirror image of a man she'd killed. Maybe twenty years younger, but it was all the same. It was too much. The sun beat down on her fiercely and Jayne Canton passed out from shock. The thought scrabbled at her brain, that she was too fucking close to the edge, but she couldn't grab hold as she toppled and went over the side.

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**Your official preview: Bub's in the lab, Sarah and Anna are outside, and Kenneth et al. are in the brig...and those are just the problems at the complex. Jayne might survive the fall - but who will she wake up too?  
**


	26. Chapter 25

**Don't Quit Your Day Job**

She figured she was dead - or should be dead – because it just wasn't right that her entire body hurt again. Breathing was starting to come back slowly and Jayne wondered how long it had taken her. The light-headed feeling could have been from the booze, the days on half-rats, or the strange certainty that she'd just seen Cahill below her. But at the moment, she had no control over any of her limbs and wasn't about to chase after a ghost.

"Is she alive?" Came a tentative voice from about five feet away. "I…I think she looks worse than me. Is that possible, Riley? That someone could look worse than me?"

"Yeah, Charlie. It's possible."

Jayne groaned then and tried to lift herself up. It wasn't solid ground underneath her, that was probably the only reason she'd survived the fall. As she realized that she'd landed on a carpet of dead zombies, well, she started cursing inside her head and before long she'd started on a general rant about the unpleasantness of the world as she pulled herself out of the rotting putrid mass of flesh.

"Is it friendly?" Came another more sarcastic voice.

She used one hand to smear something pulpy and entirely too mushy off of her face and tried to focus on the group arrayed around her. None of them moved to help. Considering the amount of gore that plopped off of her as she stood, Jayne wasn't sure she wanted to touch herself either.

Four men and one woman watched her with hooded eyes. Obviously they weren't about to take any chances on her. Weapons were close at every hand.

The man closest to her was blond, tall, and handsome in a sad serious way and to his immediate rear was a horribly scarred man, tissue warped all across one side of his face. He was tall and scarecrow thin as though he never got quite enough to eat. Jayne assigned the voice with questions to him, somehow it felt right, and continued to assess the group around her. The woman stood between the two groups of men, blond and pretty if you could discount the cold way that she looked at Jayne.

It was as her gaze passed over to the last two men that she felt the hammer punch strike her in the chest again. The first man was Hispanic with a slightly off-center smile smoking a cigarette as he watched her in amusement. Her eyes traveled down towards the unconventional weapon he carried on one leg and just for a moment she smiled in response. He'd modified a harpoon gun and she was curious as to how it would perform in action.

But it was the last man who caught and stole her attention. It was Cahill, years younger, but she couldn't believe the similarity. Black hair, a somewhat imposing nose and eyes that locked onto her with a combination of mirth and disgust. He wore full motorcycle leathers and had one hip cocked high as he stood with one boot resting on a pile of dead bodies.

"You know me?" He asked.

"I don't…" Jayne didn't know where to begin. "Are you…"

"What are you trying to ask?" The blond inserted. "You're Sgt. Canton? Right? We intercepted your call three days ago and came to help."

"I'm just." Jayne suddenly wobbled and sat down back onto the mess of bodies. "I'm – I've just seen a ghost."

"A ghost?" Charlie asked Riley. "But there's no such thing as ghosts."

"Not a literal one." She answered sadly. "He's…" Her hand shot out to cut the biker out from the crowd. "I knew Dan Cahill."

The biker's mouth dropped open and a bit of the tough veneer melted. "My father."

"Then who the hell are you?" She spat out.

"Blades." He patted the machete holstered on one leg. "You knew him?" The emphasis was on the verb and Jayne slowly nodded, her eyes never leaving this man.

"Yeah, I knew him."

"So the old bastard's dead?"

"Yes." The word took all of the energy Jayne had left and sucked it right out of her. She gave up and leaned back against the ground. The sky hung a vivid blue above her and she was suddenly so very tired. "I could really use a shower."

The team from Pittsburgh took over a small hotel in efficient fashion. Although no one really enjoyed the thought of staying in an unsecured location for very long, zombies were always drawn to live meat, they'd all been on the road for over twenty-four hours. Men went over their bikes with a keen eye for damage and gas cans were passed around the entire group. And inside the hotel, drivers caught naps as Jayne discovered to her joy that while the lack of electricity removed any hope of a hot shower, the water was still pumping fine.

It took her almost twenty minutes of scrubbing to get the biggest chunks off of her and another ten of solid soaping before she felt moderately clean.

The guard she'd been given was a nervous Charlie who stood just outside the door of the bathroom looking uncomfortable. They weren't sure they trusted her yet and Jayne wasn't sure of the opposite. The team had come because Kaufman, the man they answered to, wanted to know if Jayne could give them access to more of the military bases in the area. The only one she had access to was Area 13 and she wasn't sure that they'd survive the trip there and back again. She wasn't sure which place would be the greater evil, although Rhodes had really been making a run for the money. Pittsburgh sounded better than the other options, but only because they were missing out on the joy of mad scientists.

So she stepped out of the bathroom wrapped in the hotel towel and was surprised to see Charlie blush and drop his eyes away from her.

"Hey," she told him softly. "Don't quit your day job."

He turned redder if that was possible. "I'm still guarding you. I'm just not – just not looking at you right now. Partly because I can't tell if you're nice to look at."

She laughed despite herself. God knew he was right. Jayne had never realized how many bruises a person could have and still be alive. Here and there she could find a patch of clear skin, but most of them were more private than she was going to let a stranger see.

"These should be your size." The blond woman walked through the open door and tossed a set of clothes on the bed. "Stores in this town are for shit. Hope this works."

"You've been out in town?" Jayne asked as she picked up the clothes.

"It worked out pretty well." The other woman answered. "Most of the walkers were drawn to you and it wasn't a big town to begin with. Usually we have to come in at night and work on a schedule." She extended one hand to Jayne. "Name's Pretty Boy."

"Jayne."

They shook and Jayne scooped up the clothes. As she changed in the bathroom she realized that the woman had done her a huge favor. What was left of her clothing wouldn't be made sanitary with a few washings. It needed to be burned, or tossed off a high cliff. Jayne didn't even want to touch the trash bag she'd tossed it in, it was that covered with bodily fluids and chunks of exploded flesh.

Instead she found herself in civilian clothes for the first time in a long time. Jeans, an unflattering black top, and finally a sweater that cut the chill of the day better than she imagined. It had been so long since Jayne was clean and warm that she luxuriated in the feeling for a moment.

But as she emerged from the bathroom a second time, her guard had changed. The man who'd identified himself to her as Blades was sitting on one bed waiting for her.

"My name is Jamie Cahill, but I go by Blades." He said to her. "So how did you know the bastard?"

"He never said he had a son."

"I sure he didn't say a lot of things." A wicked grin. "He was the Sheriff. I'm more of the black sheep of the family. I ran with a big gang before the end of everything and he never liked to admit that he couldn't control me like he controlled the town."

She'd never found Cahill to be controlling but only because he'd been in charge. They'd needed someone to run the refugees inside of the Big Rock and Jayne had counted on him because of that strength.

"You liked him." Blades said it in a way that wasn't a question and gave a wry laugh. "So how'd he go?"

"He fell out of a helicopter during a rescue op. The dead got him."

"So he's not really dead."

"No," she said softly. "He is. I went out and put two bullets in his head. I had promised him that much. We had promised each other to take care of things if it ever came to that. I just never thought that I would lose so much while doing it." CJ's name was on her lips but she stopped herself.

"We've got a problem." She jumped. Riley had entered the room while she was lost in thought and she was startled by how scattered she'd become. Ever since Cahill died she'd had trouble with focus, but as he continued to speak, all of her focus came storming back to the front of her mind.

"The only person answering at your base is a man named Rhodes. He says that you're dead and the rest of the people up there are jailed for sedition."

"Jailed? I'm going to fucking kill him." She lunged to her feet as Blades shot one hand out and grabbed her elbow.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"You want weapons?" Jayne snarled back at him. "More than you'll ever be able to carry? Reloads for that beast of a rocket launcher, grenades, small arms ammunition. We've got it all."

"Where?"

"Sitting right underneath the bastard you just talked to."

"And he's just going to give it to us?" Riley asked.

"Hell, no. We're going to take it."


	27. Chapter 26

**Ancient History**

Five years earlier….

"Dr. Logan! Sir!" The assistant dashed down the hallway trying to catch up with the older man. Logan smiled at his tail and ignored him, there was so much going on that there just wasn't enough time to stop and listen to every silly question that the man had for him. There were important things going on, more vital to the national security than any adjutant could ever hope to fathom.

He rushed onwards and left the man to falter and draw to a halt as the two beefy Army guards barred entrance to the larger lab space.

"Good afternoon, Dr. Logan." One said. They usually alternated whose turn it was to greet him. He never responded but they continued to do so anyway.

Logan stepped into the pristine space and smiled. His baby, all of his research, was based around this one thing. A fragment. No more than three grams of flesh from a creature that the US government swore didn't exist. A million conspiracy theorists would have creamed their shorts if they knew what Logan had his hands on and the power of that thought made him grin.

They'd had a localized disease outbreak after the remnants of the alien ship crashed to Earth. But it wasn't until the rural situation had been controlled and carefully quarantined and isolated that they truly understood what they might be dealing with. Ever since that incident, the three grams of flesh had been maintained at sub-zero temperatures in the only facility in the world that could be quantified as a BSL-5 facility. No one outside of the highest levels of government had any inkling that Logan or his research existed. Oh, some people suspected. But the crackpots with their Area 51 theories were just that - crackpots. No one would ever know that they had touched upon the truth and the government liked it that way.

His research. Logan smiled again. His 'not-quite-a-pound-of-flesh' had remarkable properties. It could make dead men get up and walk again. Of course there were unfortunate and unpredictable side-effects, but once those were ironed out, he'd have the perfect cure. Death would be a thing of the past. And that was all that he'd ever really wanted, to be able to bring Marley back, his precious angel.

Marley's picture was posted on the wall above his desk. The Llasa Apso had always taken fabulous pictures, the kind a movie star would take, posing at just the right instant, hair flipping gently in the wind. There would never be another dog like her.

"Dr. Logan!" The man insisted again and Logan turned on him peevishly, he wasn't sure why the guards had let him past the doorway.

"What?" He snarled. Today was an important day in testing. They'd had fifteen non-human primates imported from the National Institutes of Health for the next round of his Serum #19. This was going to be the one that fixed all of the previous problems, he was certain of it. Barely visible through the five layers of heavy glass and steel between his office and the lab, the keepers were hand catching the primates to sedate them. He only had about ten minutes before they were ready for him with all the animals strapped into place in the isolation chambers. Once the initial shot was given, the primates would never see a human again. They couldn't chance an exposure like the one that had happened when Serum #1 had been given.

"Sir, you've been recalled to Washington. They're going to shut the project down."

"Shut it down?" Logan was incredulous and didn't believe it for a minute. His work was too important for the government to stop funding. He should know, he'd had at least twenty-three senators and representatives offer to pay handsomely for early access to a viable serum. Life without death was a wonderful thought to those that cultivated power like other people collected useless collections, not Logan, he only collected the advance of knowledge in hopes that it would bring back his beautiful Lhasa. There would never be another one like her. "Nonsense. They're not going to shut me down with an imminent test. This is it. This one is going to work. Now if you'll excuse me." He shoved past the man. "I need to get scrubbed through decon before I'm late."

--------------------

Logan sat at his desk. It was almost entirely cleared off. They'd done it, the bastards, they'd shut him down despite all of the progress he'd made. Huge armed guards had come in and taken all of his papers, all of his research, and every thing that had made his obsession possible. If the door guards, neither of whom Logan could recognize anywhere except in their stations at the doors, hadn't warned him and given him enough time to pass through decon one last time.

The vial was secreted in the one thing that had nothing to do with his research. Marley's picture winked at him in the light as he held it close to himself. Marley, now consigned forever to the dead, would be the one thing they couldn't take from him.

Serum #20. And like all of its previous incarnations, Logan was sure that this one would work.

* * *

_Ch. 27 - More Logan revelations and will Ana and Sarah survive long enough to find them out?_


	28. Chapter 27

**The Road to Hell…. Part I**

The last man was dragged down from behind. Bullets struck inches behind Sarah's feet as she dragged Ana away from the carnage. She could barely remember his name, Cha-something, as a heavy woman set her canines onto the meat of his thigh and ripped. The scream ripped at her ears but she kept running. His death might just give them enough time to get away.

"Sarah." They were the first words Ana had said in an hour. The blond nurse suddenly got her feet back underneath her and pointed at something in the distance. "Sarah, go there."

"Where?" The sunlight was almost blinding in its intensity. They'd broken through the trees a few feet back and were running across a clearing. Even though the open space would be a zombie magnet it also meant that they could see what was coming. Early fall had sapped any flowers from the field, but the long grass was only knee-high from frequent grazing. Ana became more insistent and pulled at Sarah's arm.

The two women stumbled slightly and as Sarah's head came back up she saw a man catch sight of them from across the field. He came after them with the lurching movement of a long dead zombie, soon he would be reduced to shuffling, but for now, it was still fast enough to make them frightened. He was also directly in the path that Ana wanted to take.

"No. No." Sarah backpedaled. "We've got to get out of here." But the reality was terrifying. They'd been abandoned. No weapons. No help. No real chance to survive. Sarah should have known that Rhodes would make his move with Cahill and Jayne gone. She should have predicted his change in disposition – but she was a scientist, not a strategist and now she was paying the price for that.

"No," Ana straightened suddenly as she regained control of her emotions. "There." She pointed with one slender hand and finally Sarah followed the gaze to its logical conclusion.

Another man now stood visible in the clearing.

Logan waved at them, a funny little motion with no urgency in it. He was still wearing the blood soaked apron but had a fairly clean lab coat underneath. With his glasses perched high on his scalp, he looked like an owl, blinking half blind through the daylight in search of them.

"Oh, there you are." He said to them. "Well, I'm really quite busy, so if you ladies would hurry up."

The dead man in the field halted and looked between the choice of meat; one older man with the stringy meat of years and years - or the two women; one fresher than the other, but still good eating. He continued after the women, blocking their approach to Logan.

"I don't have all day." Logan reminded them.

"We don't have any ammo." Sarah snapped at him. Her pistol was still on her thigh, she'd been smart enough to take it outside, but not smart enough to bring more than a magazine with her.

"We can outrun him." Ana told her.

"For heavens sake." Logan reached under his apron and brought out a wireless bone saw. He moved surprisingly fast and set the tip of the spinning blade against the zombie's head. The zombie was just starting to turn on the new, closer prey, when it suffered from a toxic aeration to the brain stem. It only took a second for the body to realize that and topple to the ground crushing grass underneath it.

"Logan?" Sarah was still in shock. "Where did you come from?"

The doctor was already headed back towards his point of origin. He waved noncommittally at Sarah, the bone saw flashing gore as he did it. "Emergency exit."

Ana stopped and laughed. And then, Sarah laughed with her. The two women beset by hilarity in the midst of it all. "Of course there's an emergency exit."

-------

The rum was clear which pissed him off. Silver rum tasted like watered down piss or hydrogen peroxide with less of a bite. As usual, Rhodes wasn't drinking what he wanted. Despite locking McDermott in the brig, the bastard of a radio man had still refused to give up the location of his stash. At less than a week sober, Rhodes figured it was just a matter of time before the lush got the DTs and gave up the liquor's location.

Until then he was stuck swilling the clear shit.

It never occurred to him that drinking had ended up him up where he was. Pissed off, pissed off, and well, Rhodes was never a very imaginative fellow.

Three quarters of his men wanted to leave Area 13 and head back to the surface. They wanted to caravan out with the pretty girls and find an island somewhere to lay out and ignore the world at large. The other quarter wanted to stay with immediate access to the female survivors who were currently locked up with the rest. Both involved the transport of large numbers unwilling females, something that didn't appeal to Rhodes despite his other faults. He was of the firm mind that women were more trouble than they were worth. Especially since those women had been exposed to the corrupting influence of Jayne, Sarah and Ana.

Who were all supposed to be dead.

The thought didn't make him as happy as he wanted it to.

Ana owed him a man. Sarah had challenged his authority. And Jayne had been the worst of the three because she'd never gone against him. Always the loyal Marine except for that one time. Yet, with every action she'd made him and his men look bad to the survivors who should have been kissing his boots.

It was a good thing Jayne was dead – or would be soon.

Because Rhodes didn't want to admit that he didn't like the position he was in.

He drank heavily again and realized that he was alone in the cafeteria. At some point recently, there had been other men in there with him. To his drunken consternation, he couldn't remember whether he'd given them an order, or whether anybody was listening to his orders anymore. At the very least it meant that no one was on patrol or paying any attention to the world above them.

But hell, the world above them was dead so it didn't really matter.

--------

Riley met her just outside the motel. Like many of the others, he had the freshly washed look that only came from a shower. His eyes crinkled slightly at sight of her, most people couldn't hide their winces as they saw that she looked just as bad clean as she had dirty. Bruises had the nasty habit of not washing off.

"Sgt." He greeted her and she frowned back at him.

"There's no army anymore. Jayne works fine."

"You've heard Kaufman's answer." It wasn't quite a question but Riley wasn't stupid enough to think that secrets stayed secret in his crew. He'd told Charlie and figured that Charlie would pass it on to the young woman that flustered him, it was the kind of thing that happened.

"He'll trade you weapons for entry."

"I heard."

But Riley couldn't tell whether Jayne liked that answer or not. "How many men will we really be facing?" Riley gestured for her to follow him to a map. Her handwriting marked the hidden location of Area 13 along with the eight different exits that Jayne knew about. One of the useful things that McDermott had discovered while he'd sat and waited for radio contact. Obviously there hadn't been time to get people to the exits, but Jayne was certain that they'd be a way in. Rhodes' men weren't smart enough to look for them or to be prepared when they came storming through.

Cholo and Blades approached slowly, talking among themselves until they reached the table. The two men had nothing in common except black hair and their height, but Jayne saw other similarities that disturbed her. They both carried themselves with the same kind of cockiness that had gotten other men killed. Yet, they had been her strongest supporters when she'd made her foolish claim to go back and take weapons from Rhodes. She had no strength or weapons to back it up. Just the knowledge of where to go and the certainty that these people needed the guns she had access to.

"At least forty." Jayne ignored the low whistle. "Army soldiers from the rank of private to staff sergeant and one captain. Operationally they're a joke. Most of them are drunk. If they haven't started summary executions – there are still three Army pilots, and eight Marines in the brig. At least half of the survivors who are imprisoned have fought the zombies successfully, especially those from the res. They were solo for a lot longer than I thought possible. If we can arm them, we outnumber Rhodes, and have better men to boot."

"You got a lot of answers, lady. But what happens when the shit hits the fan? Where will you be?"

Jayne faced down Cholo angrily. "You mean, what's in this for me?"

"Yeah."

She got as close to his face as she could get and stared at him with steel in her eyes. "I owe him."

"Chink-chink." Blades chortled. "Listen to the girl's balls clink together."

"You don't think I've got what it takes?" She didn't look away from Cholo. She was really fucking tired of being challenged. Sometimes you paid your dues and people understood and accepted it, sometimes they just found other challenges. "Give me your gun."

"Fuck you." Cholo snapped back. "Usted es una bruja de mierda loca."

Jayne spun and stalked past all three men. She caught Charlie just as he was turning to face her, a stunned look on his face as she repeated her demand. But to the three men's dismay, Charlie handed over his pistol. With that she continued past the perimeter they'd set up and back towards the little town.

"Where the hell is she going?" Blades asked, as though the others might know something he didn't.

Charlie answered the question for them as he caught up to them. "She's going to the only place that has zombies left. Back to the jail."

"Why is she going there, Charlie?" Riley asked the question as though it were perfectly normal so Charlie answered him the same way.

"Because otherwise she might shoot somebody here."

Cholo was the first to laugh, but Blades caught on quickly. The two men roared while Riley decided that he was getting perturbed by the sudden change of events. The figure in the distance was covering ground faster than they'd expected and when the four men realized that Jayne was serious, really serious, they all started running to catch up.


End file.
